Single? I'm kidding, obviously. Get married and have children, all of you.

(Unless you're Roissy, in which case you are fabulous and perfect and must never ever change. Even when you're so old you can only pick up cougars. I don't think I'm the first real man to notice that "PUA" rhymes with "gay." Not that there's anything wrong with that! But I'm just sayin'. UR comes to you proudly from zip code 94114, in which pure alpha sexuality unrestrained by womanly wisdom flames out from every other storefront. Not that I'm one to judge, but it seems to age poorly past 50.

But, well, who cares? Roissy is a sex addict and he knows it. Hunter Thompson was a drug addict, and he knew it. I'd like to think my daughter (now reading Lemony Snicket in pre-K, thank you very much Mr. Galton) will read them both and draw the appropriate conclusions. At least, when it comes to staying off the pole.)

Alas, I'm here today to talk about a much less interesting subject: your so-called "civil liberties." While I really try not to notice these things, I can't help noticing that Americans have fallen into one of our routine moral panics that We Are Losing Our Democracy. Take comfort, kids. You don't have one and nor did your grandpa.

Because I was interested in knowing why I should care about my "civil liberties," I actually downloaded this legal paper, which is the most popular download ever on SSRN. Would the pox vopuli come through again? I kept scanning for what exactly I had to fear. Fortunately, thanks to my enormous brain, I have no trouble with glorious neoplatonic gnosticisms such as:

Instead of being related by a common denominator,
some things share “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and
criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of
detail.” In other words, privacy is not reducible to a singular essence; it is a
plurality of different things that do not share one element in common but that
nevertheless bear a resemblance to each other.

or, even better,

Accordingly, there are no clear boundaries for
what we should call or should not refer to as “privacy.” Some might object to
the lack of clear boundaries, but this objection assumes that having definitive
boundaries matters. The quest for a traditional definition of “privacy” has led
to a rather fruitless and unresolved debate. In the meantime, there are real
problems that must be addressed, but they are either conflated or ignored,
because they do not fit into various pre-fabricated conceptions of privacy. The
law often neglects to see the problems and instead ignores all things that do not
fall into a particular conception of “privacy.” In this way, conceptions of
privacy can prevent the examination of problems. The problems still exist
regardless of whether we classify them as being “privacy” problems.

The very stuff and substance of Talmudic discourse in any creed or age. SSRN, alas, lacks the technology to measure customer engagement after download. But I can't help suspecting that the completion rate on Professor Solove's opus magnus resembles that of a Coursera course on Lacan. Finally, on page 22, I found something concrete: apparently in the '90s a couple of actresses were killed by stalkers who got their addresses from leaky government databases. This is very tragic. Of course, a few years later, 3000 people died to protect Zacarias Moussaoui's "civil liberties." But I suppose this would be reducing privacy to a pre-fabricated conception of a singular essence.

I did emerge, like Mark Twain from his Germanic sentence, with the belief that the gnostic mystery of privacy has something to do with the gnostic mystery of democracy. Privacy, in Professor Solove's wooly conception, would seem to be a political right - that is, a right to power, masquerading as an immunity from power. Hobbes' "desolate freedom of the wild ass" is never far off.

Just the way Roissy is a sex addict, the civil-liberties zealot is a power addict. There is a difference, however. Roissy actually has sex. Or so I believe. There is unfortunately no word that means "porn" in the context of political power, but there should be. Being a slave to desire is a low condition of the human soul, but the only condition more pathetic is that of a slave to unfulfilled desire.

Of course, history is long. Even the 20th century was long. While the civil-liberties geek of 2013 is a pathetic and even hilarious figure, it's not at all true that his passion has never gone requited. Actually, in its bureaucratic form, "civil liberties" helps keep the streets of San Francisco covered with turds and shambling zombies - two phenomena which constantly challenge and entertain my delightful precocious toddlers. "Why? Why, Pop?" Alas, though precocious, my offspring are nowhere near precocious enough to absorb the concept of the ACLU.

The ACLU! This universally respected organization, of course, is the first institution we think of when we think of "civil liberties." The ACLU is all het up that the gubmint is readin' yer emails. Who could be against the ACLU? Who but a crazy man?

Well. Does history matter, or doesn't it? Here at UR, we believe it does. In the history of the ACLU, one man looms large - Roger Baldwin, who founded that universally respected institution in 1917 and remained its leader until 1950. Could we use this one man as a test of American sincerity in our national love for civil liberties? Are we all just a nation of concern trolls? Or is there one Diogenes? Was there, rather? Could it be this paladin of freedom - Roger Baldwin?

Well. If you scroll down to the bottom of that Wikipedia page, you'll see a couple of interesting links. As a sort of spoiler, here is one. This whetted my appetite - but I wanted more. I couldn't think of a better way to demonstrate the profound and utter phoniness, the shameless and thoroughly criminal hypocrisy, of the American obsession with "civil liberties," than to visit my friendly local library and request a copy of Liberty Under the Soviets (1927).

I am happy to quote at length from this work. I feel that no inoculation is too strong against this particular variant of concern trolling. And besides, everything should be judged by its best work. As you'll see, the progressive thought of Roger Baldwin is remarkably compelling, well-written, thoroughly researched (thanks to an extensive Russian tour, from which I doubt sevruga was absent), and would strike any innocent reader as judicious and profoundly wise. Here we go - excerpting liberally, starting from the very start of the book:

A few years ago two American workers who went to join the Kuzbas colony in Siberia wrote me their impressions and feelings about Soviet Russia. They wrote on the same day at the same table -- and yet the letters might have come from two different continents, so oppositely did they view the Russian scene.

One said he never worked anywhere under better conditions. "A country in which the workers are nearer free than anywhere on earth." The other said he never lived under such a regime of graft and espionage. "If you could see how the peasants and workers really feel about it, you would know it keeps power only by force." Both men had gone to Russia pro-Soviet, but their temperaments led them to see and emphasize wholly different aspects.

Personal reactions color most of what is written about Soviet Russia. Where one puts one's emphasis is a matter of feeling and opinion. Anyone who writes of Russia owes it at the start to confess his personal bias; and on Russia everyone has a bias, conscious or not. Life under the Soviets is so packed with contrasts and contradictions, that anyone can prove almost any case his bias dictates -- and prove a case against them, if he likes, out of the mouths of the Bolsheviks themselves.

The central difficulty in any fair treatment of the Soviet experiment is to get and convey a rounded view of all the facts, showing which are temporary and incidental, and which are main tendencies and principles. Above all, anyone trying to understand Russia must bear in mind the human and historical background on which the Communists are tackling the colossal problem of reorganizing life in revolutionary terms.

On no subject is it more difficult to convey a fair view than on the issues of liberty and repression, because the viewpoints and facts are both so contradictory. Communists everywhere see Soviet Russia as the greatest hope for the freedom of the masses. Their opponents see it as just another iron dictatorship of a small, ruling bureaucracy, disciplining and regimenting life in the pattern of a fanatical Marxism. The objective truth, which must appraise both views, is hard to get in focus even with agreed facts. And even the facts are hard to state fairly, as witness the violent disagreement on them between the Communist majority and the Trotsky Opposition. The difficulty is not so much that facts are disputed, as that they are so diverse you can take your pick to suit your contentions.

My own prejudices are amply conveyed by the title of this book. Though over half of it is devoted to a description of the controls by the Soviet state, I have chosen to call it Liberty Under the Soviets because I see as far more significant the basic economic freedoms of workers and peasants and the abolition of privileged classes based on wealth; and only less important, the release of the non-Russian minorities to develop their national cultures, the new freedom of women, the revolution in education -- and, if one counts it as significant, liberty for religion -- and anti-religion.

Against all these liberties stand the facts of universal censorship of all means of communication and the complete suppression of any organized opposition to the dictatorship or its program. No civil liberty as we understand it in the West exists in Russia for opponents of the regime -- no organized freedom of speech or assemblage, or of the press. No political liberty is permitted. The Communist Party enjoys an exclusive monopoly.

Nevertheless I emphasize by title and the arrangement of this book the outstanding relation, as I see it, between the dictatorship's controls and the new liberties. For although I am an advocate of unrestricted civil liberty as a means to effecting even revolutionary changes in society with a minimum of violence, I know that such liberty is always dependent on the possession of economic power. Economic liberty underlies all others. In any society civil liberties are freely exercised only by classes with economic power -- or if by other classes, only at times when the controlling class is too secure to fear opposition.

In Soviet Russia, despite the rigid controls and suppression of opposition, the regime is dominated by the economic needs of workers and peasants. Their economic power, even when unorganized, is the force behind it. Their liberties won by the Revolution are the ultimate dictators of Soviet policy. In this lies the chief justification for the hope that, with the increasing share by the masses in all activities of life, the rigors of centralized dictatorship will be lessened and the creative forces given free rein. Peasants and workers are keenly aware of their new liberties won by the Revolution. Anywhere you can hear voiced their belief that, whatever their criticism and discontent, that they are "free." And they constitute over ninety percent of the Russian people.

Such an attitude as I express toward the relation of economic to civil liberty may easily be construed as condoning in Russia repressions which I condemn in capitalist countries. It is true that I feel differently about them, because I regard them as unlike. Repressions in western democracies are weapons of struggle in a transition period to socialism. The society the Communists seek to create will be freed of class struggle -- if achieved -- and therefore of repression.

Liberty in Russia cannot be fairly examined, as is usually attempted, on the basis of western ideas of bourgeois "rights," of Socialist Party conceptions of parliamentary democracy as the chief instrumentality for achieving socialism, or of the anarchist program for the immediate revolutionary abolition of the state and the free cooperation of workers and peasants. It must be examined primarily in the light of what Communists are attempting to do to create a society in which liberty will be a reality when economic class conflict is abolished. Only through that process, according to the Communist view of progress, will liberty and democracy come to mean something other than the freedom of the propertied classes.
[...]
What are these economic liberties? For the peasants -- eighty percent of the people -- they are primarily the right to the land they use, the control of its allotment, freedom from landlords, the right to buy and sell goods freely -- and the power to run their village business with little or no outside interference. Those liberties, bourgeois in the sense of recognizing private property, are the foundation of peasant life, for which they would defend the Soviet regime against foreign attack or counter-revolution. Bolshevik politics, Communist propaganda, the long-range schemes for building socialism, mean little to them. But the regime's encouragement of cooperatives, of machine farming, of the poorer peasants against the well-to-do, of improved agriculture, of education, of recreation, mean a new life, to which the villages, for centuries static under the old regime, are slowly responding as the new generation grows up.

No one who has seen the new life in Russian villages can doubt the feeling of liberty, of released effort and of hope which marks the active peasants -- save for the ambitious well-to-do class (the Kulaks) who resist the new order because it restricts their freedom to hire labor and rent land.
[...]
In practice Soviet democracy is obviously far short of a real democracy, that is, one in which all political functions are controlled by a majority of the persons participating in them. But such a democracy has rarely existed anywhere. That conception, however, offers a fair test by which to determine the democratic features of any system. Tested by it, the Soviet system clearly represents the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population -- the workers and peasants -- as opposed to propertied classes, and they alone participate in such democracy as the dictatorship permits. The trading class, richer peasants (Kulaks) and former czarist officials are alone disenfranchised.
[...]
The question is often raised as to whether or not Party members occupy a privileged position in Russia as compared with ordinary citizens. The answer to that must recognize first the fact that Party membership carries responsibilities far greater than those of an ordinary citizen. A member's life is controlled by the Party. His job, salary, outside activities, are all subject to orders like a soldier in an army. Members can be counted on for service as outsiders cannot. So they naturally get jobs when others are out of work, and they get better public jobs, sometimes by more competence, sometimes by political pull. But their salaries are limited to a maximum below that of many public employees, though their general salary level is higher than the average wage-workers. In certain public offices they may get some privileges through Party connections -- such as cheaper and better lodgings, occasional use of the departmental automobiles, and sometimes wholesale rates on purchases.

But the picture so often painted of a ruling political class above and over the people of Russia, enjoying the privileges of greater wealth and position, is pure invention, originating probably in a comparatively few exceptions, some of them, it is true, flagrant enough to arouse public scandal. But the Party is severe on all those who seek personal privilege in goods or position out of office or Party membership. The Party continually cleanses its membership by expulsion, getting rid of those who are not devoted, or who try to use the Party for their private interests, or whose "ideology" is not Communist. The Communist Party is hard to get into and easy to get out of.

The scores of Communists I met all over Russia, from secretaries in the small towns and villages to the heads of departments in Moscow, struck me with few exceptions as extraordinarily able and astute men -- on the whole abler, more alert and more devoted than any official class I ever met. This youth, enthusiasm and faith in what they are doing stand out in marked contrast to the routineers so common in most government service.
[...]
Anyone who travels in Russia must be impressed at once with the extraordinary diversity of the peoples of the Soviet Union, and with the intensity of national feeling among the non-Russians. And if you dig under the surface to the policies of the regime you are struck at once by a newly released freedom of their cultures so striking that it bulks large among the achievements of the Revolution.
[...]
Racial prejudice or discrimination of any sort on account of race is fought by law and propaganda. The Constitution "declares it contrary to the fundamental laws... to institute or tolerate privileges... founded on such grounds, or to repress national minorities, or in any way to limit their rights." The criminal code severely penalizes stirring up religious or racial strife. Freedom from race prejudice is probably greater in Russia than in any country of mixed population in the world. It is imbedded in the Communist political philosophy, and it is expressed practically in their political institutions. The constant effort is to aid the poorest and most disadvantaged classes, who, in mixed populations, have historically been the victims of race prejudice.
[...]
The Communist philosophy is vigorously anti-religious, based on a materialistic, scientific conception of life opposed to mysticism and theology. Though there is now no state church, there is an anti-church state. The weight of official influence is and has been continuously against the church as an institution and against religion as a force opposed to the Communist conception of scientific social progress.

To understand the significance of that attitude in Russia, one must bear in mind the primitive superstitions of the peasant masses, the priests' support of landlords and police, and the still childlike belief of the peasants in miracles and rites to bring them good fortune and good crops. The Soviet anti-religious attitude in practice is primarily a crusade to abolish peasant superstition by education in science and by practical demonstrations of the power of scientific farming as against prayer. In a time of drought, for instance, when the priests head a procession into the fields carrying ikons to bring rain, the Communists will put up posters showing dry-farming methods and the wisdom of deeper ploughing to save the grain.
[...]
To help diminish the power of religion, children under eighteen years of age are prohibited from attending religious schools. They may be instructed only by their parents in their own homes, and not even there in the cases of those youngsters who object to it, and who complain to the authorities, as many are said to have done. The Mohammedans, however, as we have noted, are allowed to admit to religious schools children as young as fourteen, a concession to the Oriental peoples, whose antagonism the Soviet regime is careful not to arouse.

Religious worship goes on almost unrestricted. The churches throughout Russia are practically all in active use and well-filled -- by women more than by men, as with us. New churches are allowed to be built, though formerly they were not. Many were taken over in the early days for sport clubs and theatres but that caused so much resentment that it was stopped. Only in Tiflis, Georgia, where the cathedral on the main street was turned into an athletic club, did I hear resentment still bitterly expressed. But Georgia is generally resentful of the regime.
[...]
Everywhere I went in Russian prisons I found long-haired, long-bearded priests still wearing their robes -- some in for common crimes, most for political offenses dating chiefly from the time of the seizures of church treasures. In the detention prison in Leningrad, where I asked to be shown the cell which Lenin occupied for a while in 1896, the door opened on a startling sight -- a patriarchal archbishop in the yellow silk robes of his office. He informed me in fluent French that he was "quite loyal to the Soviet regime," but was held, he knew not for what, on account of the government's hostility to the church. For good measure -- for the prison was crowded -- he shared the historic cell with a Finnish spy and a speculator.
[...]
To sum up, it is evident that religious liberty under the Soviets is vastly greater than it was under the czar, despite the fact that the czar was for religion and the Soviets are against it. Freedom for anti-religion is naturally much greater than anywhere else in the world, since it is officially encouraged and directed as part of the Communist program -- although it is still a weak force except as it opposes scientific agriculture to peasant superstition.

The sectarians, evangelicals, and the non-Christian religions enjoy about as much freedom as in other countries, and more than in most with a state church. The old Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches alone suffered severe restrictions, primarily due to their anti-Soviet activity. Such restrictions on general religious activity as exist, are not aimed at religious freedom. They are the restrictions common to the licensing of all private organizations and the censorship of all journals and books in the interest of promoting the Communist program.

On the other hand, the State is freer of religious influence than in any other country in the world -- which is something to be said even in comparison with the United States, where the legal separation of church and state does not prevent the interference of sectarian interests in education -- for instance through the prohibition of teaching evolution and through the compulsory reading of the Protestant Bible in public schools, to say nothing of the power of religious prejudice in elections.
[...]
The control of foreign correspondents in two ways: first, through their admission to Russia; and second, through examination of their wire dispatches. Dispatches by mail are not examined, and can be checked up only by reading the foreign press. Control over the admission of correspondents is rigid. Correspondents of hostile papers are not admitted, nor are hostile correspondents of papers whose fair representatives might be admitted. A hostile paper is one which is regarded as systematically misrepresenting conditions in Soviet Russia.
[...]
The Foreign Office keeps close watch on correspondents through reading the foreign press. It also sizes up their point of view. One type of correspondent, of whom there have been a number in Moscow, is the man who "lies by telling the truth." He selects from the Russian press for his dispatches all the damaging articles he can find, omitting anything favorable to the Soviet regime. The censor cannot call him to account for inaccuracy, but he is warned that if his paper's policy is to print only damaging news his leave to stay will not be renewed.
[...]
What are the liberties of the press under the Soviets? From a western, bourgeois point of view there are, of course, none. But
[...]
The GPU is an exceedingly efficient organization, probably the best organized political police department in the world, and therefore the most effective in discovering and arresting the offenders under its jurisdiction. It has the advantage of adding to the already highly developed system of the czar's Okhrana the knowledge of underground tactics gained by the Bolsheviks in the years when they were an illegal conspiracy. Many of the technical methods of the Okhrana, together with some of its old specialists, have been taken over and incorporated into the new system, which has larger powers and a greater personnel.

The G.P.U. is the successor to the Tcheka (the Extraordinary Revolutionary Commission), formed to fight the counter-revolution which developed shortly after the Bolshevik seizure of power, and abolished by decree early in 1922 after the civil wars and foreign intervention were over. The Tcheka was the agency of the "Red Terror," with unrestricted powers of arrest, imprisonment, and execution. The G.P.U., established in its place, taking over its machinery, buildings, and prisons, was restricted, first, by having the legality of all its orders of exile and imprisonment subjected to the review and joint control of a special Attorney-General, and second, by taking away the power of summary execution and requiring approval in advance by the Central Executive Committee.
[...]
Reports of conditions in G.P.U. temporary prisons, where prisoners are isolated from all outside contact, often in solitary cells, subject to grilling inquiry -- frequently in the middle of the night -- and worse, to uncertainty as to their fate, also heighten fear. Reports of brutality by the G.P.U., particularly of beating and third degree methods, are current, but the evidence to sustain them seems mostly to date back to the days of the Tcheka.

I have talked with many ex-prisoners in Russia and abroad, and have read also all the published accounts of the prison experiences of others, and from all of them I gathered that police brutality such as we know it in America is rare in Russia. Long-continued grillings, isolation, and wretched physical conditions are the worst of the evils of preliminary detentions. Only in Tiflis did I hear, from what seemed credible sources, of beatings to extort information.

One G.P.U. practice, frequently noted because so public, lends color to charges of brutality: the transfer of groups of prisoners on foot through the streets under soldier guard with fixed bayonets. To Americans it should be said that this brutality appears to be insignificant compared with the routine cruelties of the third degree practised daily by every sizeable police department in the United States.
[...]
To sum up, the whole system of dealing with political opposition in Russia rests on extraordinarily broad foundations - broader than elsewhere in the world. It rests first on the loose and inclusive legal definition of political offenses, and second on the extraordinary powers of the G.P.U. in arrests, prosecution, "trial," imprisonment, and exile. Both the conception of political crime and the discretion of the political police are wider either than under the czar, or than in other countries. They are analogous to other countries in a state of war, which is how Soviet Russia regards herself. But there is no such atmosphere in Russia, the system working almost invisibly.

Given the conditions out of which this stern discipline of the country grew, together with the inherited habits of government and the continuous struggle against enemies abroad and within, its excesses are understandable. They yield to a far more natural explanation than the romantic interpretation of "Asiatic cruelty" often attached to them. Moralizing about the G.P.U. system does not explain it. Its function in relationship to the dictatorship does. It occupies the place of the Communist Party's immediate weapon of defense -- swift, decisive, final.
[...]
To avoid errors in quoting official policies, the entire first draft of this book was very kindly read by a Soviet official qualified to give exact information.
[...]

Given this historical context, joining with Roger Baldwin in singing the praises of "civil liberties" is the rough moral equivalent of joining with Alfred Rosenberg in a celebration of the Deutsche Volk. Germans, we can agree, are good people. Nonetheless, if I want to say that Germans are good people, I will go out of my way ten times to avoid saying it in the same words as Alfred Rosenberg. Let alone through the same institutions as Alfred Rosenberg. Did you ever give money to the ACLU? Even $10? Feeling dirty yet? Hey, didn't you love that reference to the nasty old Kulaks?

And worse still, the ACLU (even if, to be perfectly frank, it did originate as the legal defense organ of the CPUSA) is not and was never a pseudopod of the Soviet Union. It's older than the Soviet Union. It is a quintessentially American institution in every way, shape and form - right down to its impeccably WASP founder, who no one could possibly mistake for some greasy, funny-talking little Jew. Its guilt is not their guilt. Its guilt is our guilt - and democracy's guilt.

Suppose Professor Solove is right, and privacy and democracy go hand in hand. To defend privacy is to defend democracy. To defend the guilty, of course, is to double down. There's been a lot of doubling down - a kind of moral martingale. When I think of the martingale, I always think of Wile E. Coyote, who is perfectly fine running off the edge of the cliff until he looks down. Don't look down. Your whole country, your whole century, your whole planet, might be morally bankrupt. And when operating in bankruptcy, the most important thing is to avoid doing the books.

It's not just that the Commucaust was ten times bigger than the Holocaust. It's that both are best understood as epiphenomena of the democratic era. Which isn't over yet! At least not when we classify pseudo-democracies among the consequences of democracy. And why wouldn't we? Hitler's Berlin, FDR's Washington, and Stalin's Moscow are each pretending, each in its own way, to be a "genuine democracy." Without the ideal, how could we have the pretense?

Of these three ruthless regimes, the crimes of the first are rigorously investigated and permanently famous; those of the last have been sporadically looked into, a little; and our own in the middle, emerging victorious, remains well cloaked in the usual golden froth of a hagiographic personality cult with a locked archive. Indeed, until the American, British and Soviet archives are fully opened and the inevitable gaps charted, no intelligence-quality history of the 20th century can be written - which means no history worth reading, and certainly none worth believing in.

So, don't believe! You can stop any time, really. Hey, man, it's a new century.

Since the reality of political history is that all polities of nontrivial size are controlled by organized minorities, all nontrivial democracies are pseudo-democracies. They are all different, however, since every organized minority is different. Every government flavored with democracy is irredeemably foul, but broadly the 20th-century pseudo-democratic regimes can be separated into two broad categories: oligarchical (communist, impersonal) and despotic (fascist, personal). Your preference depends on whether you prefer to be ruled by an omnipotent politician or a faceless machine. There is no difficulty in classifying the USG, or any other major modern government - they are all oligarchies.

So are we truly guilty? Perhaps this is an out - it is not us, but our rulers, who have committed these terrible collaborations. And by them conquered, of course, the world. Leading inexorably to our present national position of "global leadership," not at all to be confused with "world domination."

The question of whether the voting community is an active participant, or a passive part, in this machine, is an empirical one. It is of course much easier for the community to be an active participant in a fascist regime where individual politicians take actual power as a consequence of their personal support - although once they attain that power, they can build the usual apparatus to "manufacture consent." Thus in a sense fascism is the more democratic form, but only in a sense.

In an oligarchical regime, public opinion is always an effect rather than a cause. It still matters, but only in the sense that some effects cannot be caused. But the power of the machine is always increasing. Few in the Reagan era could have imagined that in the lives of their grown children, most Americans would come to regard gay marriage as an essential civil right. Why did this happen? Because the ruling class is sovereign not just politically, but also intellectually. What it believes, everyone comes to believe - and is horrified that previous generations somehow failed to believe.

Through the 20C America was always the leading communist power, but no form is pure. All these regimes are exquisitely vile and they have no hesitation in sharing syringes. The USSR, of course, was run by a Party organized on ultra-fascist despotic lines.

And by our good communist standards of the early 21C, early 20C America - Roger Baldwin's America, no less - looks fascist in many ways. Racism, nativism, classism and just plain domination are everywhere in sight. Unimaginable sexual prudery is universal, with many perfectly comely young women not learning proper fellatio technique until high school or even college. And worst of all, as late as Teddy Roosevelt, elected politicians actually seem to be in control of the government. (Someone should assemble a "Hitler, Mussolini or TR" quote-matching test.)

On very generous days, we might admit that politicians retained significant authority over the USG as late as the 1950s. This was when a certain Senator from North Hicksville decided to look into the matter of why a billion foreigners were condemned to total slavery and thirty million to actual death, not even for any apparent national purpose, but apparently just to get the dicks of a few hundred Georgetown civil servants hard or at least maintain them in that accustomed condition.

So the esteemed Senator asked for the State Department's super sekrit private files. State, never a stranger to hardball, told him to go take a flying fuck at a plate-glass window. The Senate, an elected institution, with massive support from the American People, up against a mere executive agency with no constitutional power. Total bureaucratic chimpanzee war! Or so you'd think. In fact, a last gasp.

Was State defunded? Erased from God's bureaucratic earth by fire - like Hamburg or Tokyo, let's not forget, ten years earlier? Roasted in the depths of a giant Sloar? State, of course, prospered. State prospers to this day. Despite the bloody scraps of Syria between its teeth. Despite? Or because of? Hey, everybody's got to eat. Democracy is messy, I can tell you!

The Senator was shunned by his colleagues. He and his friends were exiled from public life and became, over the next five decades, a metonym for paranoid criminal insanity of the political type. The American People approved! They changed their minds! They saw the Senator on TV and decided he looked like a big meanie. He couldn't even shave properly! He missed a spot! A fickle People. Perhaps next month they would have changed their minds right back. But really, why give them the chance?

The Constitution is great, but Nature has laws as well. One is that the fickle are generally not left in charge of armies, battleships or nuclear weapons. If the Constitution declares that the fickle shall rule, too bad for the Constitution. By contradicting Nature, the Constitution has contradicted itself. And it shall not rule. And that, dear Americans, is when you finally settled in under your new communist oligarchy. Whether you knew it or not. Not, mostly - but that's what it is to be a chump.

Nature's inflexible law is that if you want to hold power, you need to be competent to retain it. Otherwise, it is no use getting power. It will be taken away from you, for good and ill, by someone capable of defeating you. And the only thing more ignominious and pathetic than being defeated in the eternal contest for power, is being so owned and not even knowing it.

Alas, dear Americans - "progressives," ie, communists, and "constitutionalists," ie, fascists - the both of you, this is your pathetic condition. And you're worried that someone is grepping your emails?

Since this last epic battle between the Congress and the Executive, your country, not to mention its gloriously liberated "allies," ie, captured satellite states, has been run (with spasmodic, unserious, temporary attempts at resistance, but not reversal) by its permanent civil service. This is what "democracy" means to you: government by permanent civil servants. As for your elected officials, you could dismiss them all tomorrow, and not elect more, and your experience of government would not change in the slightest.

This bureaucratic oligarchy is a common historical form in large old states. Regardless of formal status, a "permanent civil servant" is anyone who sets government policy, is funded by the government, or has privileged access to government secrets, and who cannot be fired by any practical executive action. This definition includes essentially all professors and journalists - and all legitimate and/or respected professors and journalists. It's really quite sustainable. For instance, for the last two millennia it's been the normal condition of Chinese government. It is unusual to have a figurehead People instead of a figurehead King, Pharaoh Emperor. But since neither matters, the difference doesn't matter much, now, does it?

And this is how you come to live in a world where there are these two separate concepts, "politics" and "democracy," with opposite emotional valence. Calling anything "political" is a harsh condemnation. But if it is "democratic," it is good and sweet and true. But what is democracy without politics?

Nothing more than the American system of government - communism, ie, rule by the party of civil service. As Americans, we can at least be thankful that communism has done less damage here than elsewhere. It's great to be an exporter, especially when your product is dioxin. It gives you the comforts you need to worry that someone is grepping your emails.

Thus, while I am not really one for purges, I'd be dismayed to see anyone who calls himself a real reactionary worrying at all that Obama is reading his email. Or whatever.

First of all, a reactionary is a gentleman (or a lady). A gentleman (or a lady) doesn't whine. If he finds himself whining, it will be because his leg has been crushed by a truck and he's in enormous fucking pain. It won't be because some meanie is denying him his universal human right to rule the country, or his 1/10^8 share in that right, or whatever.

My son actually thinks he has human rights. It's because he's 2. This morning he asserted his right not to take his amoxicillin - with some success, but not much. I expect the critics of the NSA to have about the same luck. When I became a man, I put aside childish things.

For a man or for a community of men, the right to rule is a function of the might to rule. If the sound competent Midwest can get itself euchred out of its democratic right to rule by a bunch of slick Harvard men, the sound competent Midwest cannot maintain its authority and will get euchred by someone someday. If it's not Harvard today it'll be Yale tomorrow.

As for your right to "privacy," as if having your emails grepped affected you in any way, it is by accident. Forget about the opponents of the government being persecuted. If they are persecuted, which is not their decision of course, (a) it will not be by means of grep, and (b) they'll have to learn to deal with it, like men, rather than whining like little girls.

Obviously, almost all of those complaining are complaining because they are better communists than the Obama administration. A remarkable achievement, though it owes more to the complainees. Power does season a man - maybe only Nixon could go to China, but only Eric Holder could crack down on the Associated Press. (Hey guys - I know you're big fans - don't you like the way that red lightsaber feels in your hand? Swing it around a little. Well-balanced, isn't it? Nice test cut you've taken - maybe it's time for some real rail-splitting? Take it home, use it for a week, bring it back if you don't like it? You'll really enjoy working out with this little baby, I can tell you.)

But unfortunately, America is a communist country and Americans are not persecuted for being too communist. Au contraire - they are petted and lionized. They appear daring while taking no risks. It's perfect. It's true that there were a couple of periods where as many as ten or twelve communists suffered mild professional consequences for cavorting too openly with the Soviet mass-murder cult. Surely ten Americans a day are fired for racism. Hitler has been dead for 70 years, and the Brown Scare rolls on - at a thousand times the maximum intensity of "McCarthyism" or the Palmer Raids.

So if you're a good communist, you have only symbolic worries about your privacy. These worries are simply a projection of your political penis envy. You react the same way to having your emails grepped as if someone said you weren't allowed to vote in 2016. In reality, this loss would not affect you at all. Symbolically, however, it would represent a profound Freudian castration. In fact, if you fail to express your symbolic political masculinity, preferably through a Facebook update, you will feel castrated by default. But gross public outrage restores your hypothetical testosterone.

Whereas out here on the "extreme right," some of us actually do oppose the government. I would be genuinely worried if I thought Washington was capable of persecuting dissident intellectuals. One way to see where America is going is to look at where its satellites in Europe are, and Britain and other countries certainly treat jokes on the train and casual anti-Party tweets much the same way the Czech authorities in 1971 or the German authorities in 1937 treated unconstructive public comments about the Party or the Leader.

But really, these fools are easy targets. Yo, don't be an easy target. Don't blow shit up and don't try to found any tax-exempt organizations, and you ought to be fine. The Cheka ain't in the building. And the process of turning our progressive bureaucrats into Chekisty would not involve making them more awful, but more energetic, manly and capable. I won't hold my breath.

It is obvious to those of us who actually have a reason to consider the government a genuine threat, that these surveillance mechanisms are not a genuine threat. Rather, they are designed, probably not very well, to do the job they are supposedly doing, which is a hard job and really can't be done well.

A prudently governed nation would not need to record everyone's phone calls and emails. A prudently governed nation would concern itself with its own affairs and no one else's. It would thus maintain either a culturally and politically homogeneous state in which terrorism was no more a concern than in the conflict between Vermont and New Hampshire, or a polycultural regime like the Ottoman one, in which every culture governs itself and knows it will suffer, not advance, if its members go crazy. But apparently the Orwellian panopticon creates more jobs in Virginia than the boring alternative of fencing the borders and enforcing consular law, so we can expect it to thrive. Americans prefer this ridiculous regime to any other. Yet they still object to being blown up indiscriminately in public places as if they were Israelis enduring the "peace process." So there is really no alternative, especially as our impending defeat in Afghanistan will swell the jihadi supply.

Moreover, the fascist militarists who actually do this job are some of the best men in America. American communism, for obvious reasons, loves to send America's best men to Afghanistan to get their private parts Osterized by fertilizer bombs. This is American war since 1945: State solving the problem of how it can get DoD to stick its dick in a blender. Solving it rather well, I'd say. Many of America's best men are in the Pentagon, and good men know how to obey, and into the blender goes that dick. Still, much testicle remains.

All this said, no nation is or ever has been perfect. All have committed terrible crimes. All men, of course, are sinners. America is a communist country, the whole world is America, and communism is a religion of pure hate and murder with 100 million corpses on its conscience. Still it continues. Many, even most, "progressives" are perfectly nice people. Libertarians, such as Edward Snowden (whose girlfriend, sadly, will have no alternative but to seek tingles in the arms of Roissy), are often even better. I used to be a libertarian myself. I didn't realize my brain was doing the nasty with Roger Baldwin. Snowden himself seems like a nice guy, and future pressure-cooker bomb victims can only wish he'd found UR in time.

I sometimes think about how the Third Reich of 2013 would rationalize the Holocaust if somehow, in 1945, one of Hitler's wonder weapons had actually turned the tide. The Holocaust, of course, was a war crime - the peacetime Reich never could have committed such a deed. Perhaps it could have only been committed by a Reich that knew it was losing the war. Perhaps we were lucky enough not to see what atrocities democracy would have committed, had it been about to lose its war - we certainly committed enough in the winning. But be that as it may.

Would this victorious Germany, in the lives of its grandchildren, feel any sense of national guilt? It's easy to feel guilt on behalf of the Other - this is not guilt, but condemnation. The Germany of 2013 has conveniently converted its grandparents into an Other, and so can feel guilty on their behalf. Naturally it feels no guilt at all for the crimes of democracy, its actual present ideology. But be that as it may. What about the question?

I think the answer is no. First of all, though everything I know about Hitler tells me he ordered the Holocaust, this is just my personal judgment. There is no actual evidence either way. So the crime, though it could not possibly have been concealed from history, would be ascribed not to National Socialism, not even to Hitler, but rather to Himmler. Similarly, American historians overlook the obvious fact that Alger Hiss could have done nothing without FDR's personal permission, and mistake the Hiss-Hopkins backchannel to the KGB for a case of "espionage" - not even considering the idea that FDR, the New Deal, or America as a whole could be seen as generally guilty for our collaboration, concealment, and general complicity with Stalin's enormous crimes.

Never underestimate the power of "no true Scotsman." I once enraged the husband of my cousin, a devout Obama voter who grew up in the Soviet Union, by asking him what the Russian translation of "progressive" was. Of course he knew perfectly well that the Soviet ogre had uttered this word continuously from 1917 to 1989. Indeed, "progressive" has been exclusively a euphemism for "communist," on both sides of the Atlantic, since the mid-30s or so. And yet, his response would be: Stalin was not a true progressive, but a demon pretending to be a true progressive. In fact, this is the standard position of today's neo-communist on the USSR: fascist deviationism, not true communism. Did the experiment fail? Au contraire, mon frere - it has never been tried!

Just so. And so, the National Socialist of our alternate 2013 would declare: nothing could possibly be as un-German as the Holocaust. (True.) Since Himmler ordered the Holocaust (true), nothing could be as un-German, and therefore as un-National Socialist, as Himmler. Himmler, therefore, stands unmasked by history's prosecution as no true Nazi. And so forth. In fact, it is not out of the question that even Hitler himself could be condemned as no true Nazi. If Stalin is no true communist, why not?

And life in our alternate Third Reich? It would go on, as it does in our communist world - cheerfully unstained by any kind of genuine moral reflection. Just as I have a genuine respect for Roissy's honest, if foul, amorality, I have an enormous contempt for sham moral outrage. Can there be real outrage? Absolutely. But you cannot get from the sham directly to the reality. You have to abandon it for pure cold cynicism, then work hard for even the smallest scrap of genuine human feeling. Alas, it will not be as stimulating as your porn, your "civil liberties" and the like. Hopefully in time you will nonetheless come to prefer it.

Would this victorious Germany, in the lives of its grandchildren, feel any sense of national guilt?

Does America feel any sense of national guilt for committing the largest ethnic cleansing in European history and dropping two nukes on Japan to scare the rest of the world into bending over? To ask the question is to answer it. How many people even know that the Allies committed the largest ethnic cleansing in European history?

Der Spiegel, or the Huffington Post, or some similarly odious wing of the global America, ran a story -- one single story -- on the ethnic cleansing of the Germans from Eastern Europe. What did the comment section say? "Oh, they deserved it. Nazis." I would imagine that the treatment of the Holocaust under a victorious Third Reich would be similar. We don't need to attribute the expulsion of the Germans to minor bureaucrats under Roosevelt and Churchill; it's far more effective not to talk about it at all. The only crimes of America are the times when it wasn't American enough.

In the comment section of the linked Ron Unz's linked piece, a certain "EngineerScotty" demonstrates a good example of illogical belief leading to contradiction. Will that poster identify the root of the absurd beliefs he holds?

"But really, these fools are easy targets. Yo, don't be an easy target."

The easy target list keeps growing, who knows when you'll end up on it.

You know what's a great way to "become worthy". Write long tracks on the internet about how doing nothing is actually brave and supporting evil is actually prudent. Then dues ex machina later you're in absolute power and can do the total opposite of everything you've been doing your whole life without consequence. Which is important, because we've already established that if there are any consequences at all you don't want any part of them.

Some straightforward logic: either the proverbial gasenwagen will one day get down to the business of making its neighborhood rounds picking up Internet misfits, or it will not. (Why not? Well, say USG collapses first, or perhaps our Chekists are emasculated rag dolls, who knows.)

In the former case, Echelon (or whatever they like to call it nowadays) will either bring the gasenwagen closer to your doorstep, or it will not.

(In case you care, the answer is probably 'not.' The surveillance-industrial complex exists mainly to vacuum up tax dollars, with actual secret police work as an afterthought.)

Note that in no case will the gasenwagen be delayed by so much as five minutes (Do I get gassed for free if the van is late? Like old-fashioned pizza delivery?) by whining, legal wrangling, angry letters to the editor, waving about a dog-eared copy of the Constitution, and the like.

Unfortunately, as the "extreme right" has been effectively severed from public representation and assembly, its arguments remain somewhat circular and unrefined; on the one hand you can't claim this rowdy bunch is Crowdist or engaging in group-think; but on the other hand, it lacks anything that could be considered genuine cohesion.

Thus, if what our interlocutor says is true about the 'grepping' of emails (given that SQL Server does not have a Regular Expressions assembly installed by default, we wonder if the government, even the NSA, is able to 'get-regular-expression' against anything in its 'database') we should connect with another thought: the pretend power of the voter and his supposed fear of loss of privacy/civil liberties? If his moral outrage is a sham and his power is a sham, we must also conclude that probably the dissident intellectual's power is a sham as well, and our government not scooping him up could as easily be because he is incapable of opposing the government as well as it being unable or unwilling to do so.

If indeed it is the case that we send our 'best men' to these security operations, then it may very well be that some dissident intellectuals have not come far enough in their supposed 'cyncism' to realize the truth: Intellectuals are physical cowards and are never a threat unless they use whatever charisma they have to command force. At which point they become an 'easy target'. See? Do nothing. Problem solved.

On the other hand, should we step aside and define the point at which we wish to reset - the system of government we wish to reconstruct with knowledge of the failures of our so-called 'democracy' - we might be subject to having to defend these things without recourse to block-quoting pages upon pages of uncontextualized, unedited source documents.

I'm just saying.

If you're gonna resist this governance, this is the time to begin doing something instead of talking about it.

I found that most video game companies fail because most people who 'want to make video games' - don't, they want to talk about video games. Rule #1 of Living Factory: This is not a game discussion club.

Modern technological infrastructure is amazingly fragile and totters on the verge of systemic collapse from sheer neglect (U.S. power grid, etc.) Its professional defenders, at least on the managerial level, are by and large desk-flying time-servers who follow idiot checklists: human MS-Windows boxes.

So I imagine that it is only a matter of time until this hypothetical turns from the "cryptozoological" into the historical.

We can certainly hope that this is one cryptozoological anomaly that will, unlike everything on 'Ancient Aliens' and 'Ghost Hunters' leave some manner of empirical evidence of its testicular fortitude, unmistakeable to the naked eye.

However, I would assume that if it exists, it won't be found chatting on Google's Blogger platform, if it is the USA we've got in mind.

But what darknet is not infested with lefties? Thus, I call bunkum on this creature until I stare into his eyes.

I, for one, would prefer that the beast stay a mythical one. Perhaps because I'm not entirely tired of living just yet.

But in the unlikely event of it actually existing, you are quite right that it is not to be found here. Or on any "darknet." Or in any kind of association with public wankers, however informal.

I will hazard a guess that it will not be an identifiable miscreant or social misfit of any sort. Rather, it will be a sober person with a solid technical education, impeccable professional record, and perfectly legitimate institutional access to the finest bioengineering/chemical/electronic equipment.

Incidentally, here's a beautiful example of what this wouldn't look like. That particular Nessie's just a piece of junkyard flotsam on the Loch.

other needs: to 'play at' career before retiring at 33, to spend her youth (15-30) on anyone and anything other than her future husband, to run up a reverse dowry of debt (student debt and credit card debt), to never marry (for non-UMC women)

I'm more than happy to believe that every pinko was actually a commie. But let's be real here. You are selectively quoting from his life.Here is La Wik

In 1927, he had visited the Soviet Union and wrote a book, Liberty Under the Soviets. Originally, at the beginning of the ACLU, he had said, "Communism, of course, is the goal." Later, however, as more and more information came out about Joseph Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union, Baldwin became more and more disillusioned with Soviet-style communism and called it "A NEW SLAVERY" (capitalized in the original).[4] He condemned "the inhuman communist police state tyranny".[5]

In the 1940s, Baldwin led the campaign to purge the ACLU of Communist Party members.[5]

In 1947, General Douglas MacArthur invited him to Japan to foster the growth of civil liberties in that country. In Japan, he founded the Japan Civil Liberties Union, and the Japanese government awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun. In 1948, Germany and Austria invited him for similar purposes. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1951.[6]

In my eyes, General MacArthur carries great moral weight as a bonafide anti-commie. Or do you disagree? He seems more like a Whittaker Chambers like character (though not exactly) than what you make him out to be.

The Soviets were serious about establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, albeit one run by a Leninist revolutionary vanguard. American communism is bourgeois communism; most self-proclaimed communists today are revisionist and buy into New Atheism, postmodernist identity politics ("social justice"), cultural universalism, and so on -- all fundamentally liberal (as opposed to Communist) memes that no capital-C Communist would go anywhere near.

Liberals are deathly allergic to nationalism; capital-C Communists are not. That's the easiest test. Ask them about Libya, or even Venezuela. Anyone who starts sputtering about civil liberties and "but repression!!!" is a liberal. Similarly, it is often advanced as an intendedly serious criticism of Soviet Communism that the USSR banned psychedelic music, or that in East Germany you could only get one type of egg cup. The people doing the advancement are liberals.

America is communist, in Moldbug's sense, but it's not Communist. This is also the error that engineerscotty in Unz's comment section falls into. The American left demonstrably does not like Chinese or Soviet Communism. (Cuban it's okay with. I'm not sure why. Probably the Che T-shirts, and the fact that Cuba isn't a serious threat to anything or anyone besides Cubans.)

This post is too long for me to read at one sitting...I will come back to it.In response to the uh.. "might makes right" masculinity/virility concept, I shall offer a glimpse from Chantal Thomas's book called "Les Adieux à la Reine", which is the fictionalized accountant of July 14,15,16, 1789, seen from Versailles by Marie Antoinette's out loud reader, a young woman of.. modest origin. (Incidentally, I loved reading that Marie Antoinette spoke gently to her.. little people. Logical.)At Versailles, a GENTLEMAN never presented himself at Court in the accoutrements of his military function.A GENTLEMAN changed before entering court, if only to preserve appearances which are very important (which is why a transparent world is a brutal, ugly one where... you can see the body's organs without having them masked by that consummate camouflage, the skin.). Otherwise, he was not a gentleman... (personally, I am rather nostalgic for gentlemen in the world without end French revolution times we live in)On another note, I read recently that sodomy was on the rise...So.. we are living in a Sodomite world ? Logical.The French Revolution keeps unfolding..By the way, apparently the word "communism" first appeared in Germany in the 18th century, to qualify.. the French Revolution...Dixit my French etymological dictionary, at least...

As a woman, I can say that a Cathedral type is not necessarily... a gentleman.And a gentleman doesn't have to be a Cathedral type.After all... it is important to remember the sense of proper place and time in all things...

Let's keep the manosphere whining out of here. Probably a mistake on OPs part to mention Roissy. For whatever good he's done anyone who remains that obsessed with sex that long is damaged. Most people get some bangs, accept that they can do it, and then move on to other things. Having the usual goons come around in the comments isn't going to enhance much discussion.

I guess that an easy case can be made that porn is akin to political agitation.

In one area you have porn (horniness stimulating depiction of human acts) and the empty satisfaction of sexual desire through acts of masturbation. Acts of increasing sophistication (and satisfaction level) from using own body to increasing sophisticated devices until the use of complete human facsimile (dolls).

In the other area you have political agitation (libido dominandi stimulating depictions of human activities) and the corresponding satisfaction of this libido/desire. Satisfaction provided by a hierarchy of empty acts of increasing sophistication, from voting, protesting, culminating in violent protest (with violence the facsimile of power).

Which is as far from exerting actual power as rubbing ones genital area with a dildo or pseudo-vagina/mouth/anus is from actual sexual intercourse with another living, breathing, human.

I would presume that on this scale suicide bombing is akin to erotic auto-asphyxiation.

So political agitation serves about the same role as pornography, in a separate area of human activity.

The similarities go even deeper in the way political agitators and pornographers use the various media, old, new, and emerging.

Old Pol Pot was a merry old soulAnd a merry old soul was he. And he killed all the profs,and he killed all the docs,And he killed the bureaucracy.And every lawyer he made a farmer,And all journalists had to flee.Oh there's none so rare as can come compare To Pol Pot and his polity.

The problem with Mencius's whole "Why does [insert your latest travesty] surprise you? After all, we've been communists for almost a century now!" spiel is that socialist values have, evidently, not begun to thoroughly penetrate the American population until relatively recently. Hence Mencius's admission that someone in the Reagan era would have been shocked to learn that within his children's lifetime American society would endorse gay marriage.

To wit, if we've really become communist, or whatever, for almost a century now then we should've been much more secular circa a half century ago given that communism is a form of secular millennialism.

After seeing HN go ape-shit with all the PRISM revelations, I'm pleased MM has posted his analysis. My post-UR self simply can't see those stories in the same way any more. The grandiose little speeches, the bizarre conspiracy theories*, the cliched comparisons to 1984... it frustrates me that there are so few places where one can have a rational discussion of all this.

* As one commenter on Quora pointed out, there's no way PRISM could do a fraction of the stuff it was meant to be able to do with a $20 mil/year budget. If they spent it all on programmers, that would net them 100 people, but that's not accounting for a) the markup on contractors b) government inefficiency and c) all the necessary managers and pen-pushers, which means they'd be lucky to get 30 developers on the project. Couple that with the incredible complexity of modern websites (even Facebook and Google themselves can't easily answer queries about their own data without specialised infrastructure - that's why Hadoop and MapReduce exist) and it's likely that PRISM doesn't do all that much. It's not surprising that the MSM would be getting confangled with questions about "dropboxes" and "direct access", but HN should know better. Anyway I digress.

My view of these events was similar to MM's: we need the NSA to do what they do, and as the last few weeks showed, they need to do it in secret because people don't know what's good for them, and yet there probably are far more effective ways for them to do what they do. MM didn't list how ineffective - being from a smaller country than America, I was amazed at the figure, but something like over a million Americans work in some capacity at gathering intelligence. This strikes me as rather low value for money, especially given the incompetence of most terrorist organisations. Gwern of gwern.net links to various studies which find that most Jihadist organisations largely exist to make their members feel good about themselves, and that most terrorist websites are largely occupied with young male fantasists who don't have the guts to walk the talk. In that sense they are almost exactly like the PUAs and civil libertarian porn addicts.

Also, did anyone notice some of the little bits of reactionary thought creeping into the "Liberty in the Soviet Union" extract? For example, the idea that people have more political freedoms when the ruling class feels secure (bringing to mind Bismarck: "they say whatever they want and I do whatever I want"), or the idea that political and civil liberties are pretty meaningless if you're poor as fuck (bringing to mind Deng Xiaoping: "let's get rich before worrying about democracy").

I guess the nature of power is visible to all people in all times and places, one only has to have the eyes to see and the motivation to look.

$20 mil. goes a long way when you can conscript Google, Apple, etc. to do much of the technical work and supply/maintain most of the equipment. An extra root login and extra optical line in some locked closet cost hardly anything.

Of course much of the actual intelligence gathering is done by... you and I. That is, by the chumps who dutifully fill "the cloud" with petabytes of dirt on themselves - voluntarily.

Stanislav, if you haven't already seen this, it's worth a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5876108

I've linked to the comment thread directly as it's worth a skim. The top commenter, tptacek, is a HN regular who runs his own security consultancy and was one of the few people arguing against the PRISM hysteria. Naturally most other HN members disagree with him (quite vehemently) but the back-and-forth discussion is interesting.

You may well be right - no-one here can really know the full extent of PRISM. It's the word of the NSA vs the word of the Guardian.

nyd, I really liked this post which was linked from the post you linked to: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-american-pravda/. I think it'll be a good intro post for people who need to be shown a glimpse of the matrix, but for whatever reason aren't ready to be shown the bright light of unfiltered reality as per UR.

This in particular:

Consider the fascinating perspective of the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state—one social-democratic and one neoconservative—in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, Russia’s rulers could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America’s history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme.

MM also mentioned Russia before, specifically the enthusiastic student fans of Putin who are mirror images of Western college progressives. It's interesting to look at Russia as a (slightly rickety) clone of the West, since it's a rare chance to see our system deconstructed and reassembled by a disinterested third party.

(The Chinese seem to be going their own way, though I have a theory that the EU is converging on the same form of government as China but from a different direction. They're both building technocracies with democratic pretensions - China started with the technocracy and added the democratic pretensions, the EU started with democratic pretensions and added technocracy).

"Astonishing the number of logical fallacies, misdirections, lies and outright absurdities fit in 102 short words, 654 characters."

I don't think so. A communist society is (among other things) an aggressively secular society, and although American society is going in that direction it has generally been exceptional among its Western counterparts in its religiosity over the last century. Ergo, I find it hard to believe that we've actually been communist all this time when we haven't been exhibiting one of the characteristic traits of a communist society. This tells me that something is off with MM's analysis of our history.

Moreover, the idea that communism/socialism is a kind of secular millennialism can hardly be doubted. To my knowledge, all the communist/socialist revolutions of the last century initially promised that a new golden age was just around the revolutionary corner. Indeed, this is how they were able to justify killing all those people, whom they saw as standing in the way of humanity realizing its greatest potential and ultimate destiny. In their minds, the blessedness of the new golden age would justify all the sacrifices needed to ensure its arrival.

Hence Mencius's admission that someone in the Reagan era would have been shocked to learn that within his children's lifetime American society would endorse gay marriage.

The now almost-extinct Blood Red Commies never endorsed gay marriage. Or feminism. Nor multiracialism - Vlad Lenin adored Birth of a Nation. Marx was a racist. Komrad Stalin would have treated a black underclass with substantially more robust countermeasures than Bull Connor would have ever dared even if Connor held dictatorial powers.

The original bureaucracy has often been called a “government by gentlemen,” which more or less persisted through the Jeffersonian era. Bureaucrats were thought to be public-spirited, independently established farmers or merchants who could put aside their own interests for a while to serve the public good. Thomas Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, and Alexander Hamilton all fit this mold—none of them ever made a dishonest dollar from public service.

By the 1820s, fraud was creeping into the executive departments, which in turn contributed to the Jacksonian revolution and a sea change in how the bureaucracy was staffed. Andrew Jackson believed that government by gentlemen had degenerated into rampant corruption, tilting public policy away from the interests of all the people (or at least his main constituency in the West) towards the elites. He instituted “rotation in office” as a tool to clean out the bureaucracy and make it more reflective of the general public, and thus (he hoped) more responsive to the public good.

But rotation in office soon became the corrupt “spoils system,” facilitating the graft and mismanagement that characterized the federal government during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. Reformers of this period began calling for an educated, professional bureaucratic class free of political interference. After the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881 by a man rejected for a diplomatic post, the public outcry led Congress to respond with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, the first major stab at improvement.

More reforms would follow over the years, giving rise to the (supposedly) apolitical bureaucracy that we have today. Indeed, the professionalization and autonomy of the bureaucracy was a prerequisite for the modern liberal state, which claims moral legitimacy through the disinterested application of “scientific” principles of management. It wouldn’t have been possible if the percentage of political appointees had not been scaled drastically downwards between the Civil War and the Great Depression.

That is how America ultimately addressed the principal-agent problem of the bureaucracy: We would hire only qualified people, free them almost entirely from politics, and insist they employ this new “science” of administration.

There were times this past week when it seemed like the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party had returned to Washington. President Obama insisted he knew nothing about major decisions in the State Department, or the Justice Department, or the Internal Revenue Service. The heads of those agencies, in turn, insisted they knew nothing about major decisions by their subordinates. It was as if the government functioned by some hidden hand.

Clearly, there was a degree of willful blindness in these claims. However, the suggestion that someone, even the president, is in control of today’s government may be an illusion.

The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself: It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.

The difference between Communism and the progressives (and the progressive's European twin, EU Federalism) is that the Communist Golden Age of man was supposed to be ushered in by the perfected proletariat, whereas the technocrat left Utopia would be brought about by an unaccountable clique of "educated", "apolitical" bureaucrats.

Aside from one heroic Stalinist holdout in Northeast Asia, Communism burned itself out because the capitalists tranquilized the once revolution-ready proletariat with electronic gizmos. The middle class was bought off by the plutocrats even longer ago - Marx correctly predicted that the French Revolution would be the first and last time the middle and upper middle classes would ally with the extreme left.

The soft left, the technocrat left, is still going strong because they occupy bureaucratic organizations that can't be held accountable for their actions.

In the long term, the idea of a professional Civil Service detached from politics may yet prove more disastrous than the idea of a perfectible proletariat.

Well, the prevaricatorial mendacity starts with the opening "The" and proceeds from there.

BTW, I much admire the usage of "spiel". A touch of lubricating gentleness, that. "Shtick", although more appropriate in the context of the comment, and the general context of this blog, would have felt too rough, and negatively impacted the successful delivery of the lie.

The boldness of starting with a lie, from the very first word, and then the subtlety of using just the appropriate level of belittling descriptor. And then, the sheer amount of refined bullshit delivered in what? 103 words?

Heh. I'll take it as a compliment that you consider my work (in some sense) "refined."

For what it's worth, I don't think MM is far off. American society has definitely been moving in a socialist direction for a long time now, though I don't think it's accurate to say that we've actually been a socialist society all this time (or communist or whatever you want to call it). Personally, I would locate the beginning of that process somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, so earlier than MM I think.

"I'd be dismayed to see anyone who calls himself a real reactionary worrying at all that Obama is reading his email."

The American surveillance-and-analysis apparatus does not just "read the email" of Americans, it X-rays the whole world at will.

Even assuming that the reactionary ethos demands that subjects not complain about their sovereign's godlike access to every last detail of their lives... do subjects of other sovereigns have the "right" to object?

So here we see a source of conflict in the post-democratic world, should it ever arrive: wars between sovereigns, over which portion of the human biomass they get to claim as their own.

@TUJYou are very wrong about Bolsheviks' support of feminism. Female participation in the labor force grew apace after the October coup, with kindergartens where even 6-month babies could be placed in the care of state nannies. Also, in the first heady years of military communism, it was free love for all (read about Kollontai), every komsomol girl was exhorted to give it to every komsomol boy who wants it — doing otherwise was "bourgeois hogging". The Bolsheviks completely overhauled marriage law, doing away with church involvement, equalizing the husband and wife legally and even removing alimony from the books. Later Stalin saw that this progressive policy crashed the birthrate, and started tightening the screws again.

> we need the NSA to do what they do, and as the last few weeks showed, they need to do it in secret because people don't know what's good for them

In the pornographic allegory of politics this would be the cuckold fantasy. Obama, Holder etc would wear slave costumes and the reactionary (in plantation owner costume) would whip them every once in a while for not fucking the people (plantation owner's wife, in southern belle costume) hard enough. 'Cause, that's how reactionary you are.

I get your point but still stand by what I wrote. Aside from the free love thang, Soviet feminism was more of the late 19th century variety. The Bolsheviks and their descendents never degenerated close to Swedish feminism where men are now instructed to sit while urinating and to breast feed babies.

I get your point but still stand by what I wrote. Aside from the free love thang, Soviet feminism was more of the late 19th century variety. The Bolsheviks and their descendents never degenerated close to Swedish feminism where men are now instructed to sit while urinating and to breast feed babies.

Actually the Bolshevik Georg Lukacs imposed a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools as the deputy commisar for culture under the Bela Kun regime. Children were instructed in "free love", sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy, the irrelevance of religion, etc. Women as well were called to rebel against the sexual mores of the time.

> Excuse my ignorance but who is the senator mentioned in the article?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy

McCarthy is usually quoted to have said: "The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."

An objective analysis of ye olde hard left and modern Davos-man reveals we are dealing with two different species of liberalism, where the latter is proving worse than the former.

This conclusion is reached by noting two characteristics where they diverge:

1) How their respective political Utopias will be reached.

2) How power is traced through their systems.

The ideology of Communist man and Davos man are based on two different Utopian fantasies.

Marx and his ilk believed Paradise would be reached by perfecting the proletariat once they had been liberated from the stultifying upper classes.

This proved to be a weak basis to work off work from because the capitalists were able to buyoff the proles with nudie magazines and domestic beer and because there was never any chance the proles could become selfless enough to make Communism viable.

The progressive left's founding error was to believe, paraphrasing apparent UR reader Jay Cost, that a "scientific" administrative class, the Davos man, could be freed of political corruption.

An incorruptible political class, bureaucratic or otherwise, is as impossible as Marx's nobleman proletariat: Whoever wields power will give into crude political temptations because power is inherently corrupting in the hands of any man. Even Davos man. Especially Davos man, actually.

The American left demonstrably does not like Chinese or Soviet Communism.

The beloved Franklin was certainly fond of "Joe". Interwar year American progressives like Woodrow and Baldwin sang many Hosannas for the Soviets, at least initially.

By the time of the Cold War, the elected progs up to LBJ had turned into gungho containment hawks. The Cathedral itself was more pro-Soviet, because they don't hae to worry about the whole accountability thingy. But US politicians have always been behind in their liberalism compared to their Cathedral sponsors.

It is a quintessentially American institution in every way, shape and form - right down to its impeccably WASP founder, who no one could possibly mistake for some greasy, funny-talking little Jew. Its guilt is not their guilt. Its guilt is our guilt - and democracy's guilt.

Mein Fuhrer, expecting paleocons to get the facts straight about WASPs is about as hopeless as educating them about the Lutheran cult known as Reform/assimilated Jewry. Or to write an interesting article on any subject. Please, Taki, tell us again about how traumatized the sacred bullshitter, ah, martyr Sobran was when Bill Buckley flipped him the bird on the highway in the summer of '74.

Their mythical hagiographies of the Jew-intermarried and non-denominational (and non-exterminated) WASPs conveniently ignores the fact the WASPs haven't been conservative since 1945.

Jewish sniping about being rejected by country club WASPs only apply to the pre-New Deal and defunct conservative WASPs, who let the record show, were and are also pilloried by their own post-WWII prog children.

Actual, not rhetorical, WASP-Jewish political relations have always moved in complimentary lockstep with one another. The Jews preferred Unitarian Adlai Stevenson over Hitler-slayer Ike. Breyer and Ginsburg went in ideological harmony with WASPs John Paul Stevens and David Souter.

And when they were reactionary, none of the paleos know WASPs played the role of the Roman Senate to the Old South's Cartago (justly in my judgement).

If they weren't incapable of imaging political dynamics beyond two dimensional tribe-other thinking I'd call paleocons liars. But we'll be generous, as Ashkenazim always are, and excuse them as ignorant blockheads. And, they're welcome.

Goes back further to Engels who wrote some tracts about sexual liberation before he died.

No, it doesn't really go back to Engels. You might be thinking of Engels's book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. That wasn't a tract about "sexual liberation." It was a book of historical materialist theory that explained social, family, and sexual relations as being products of economic, material conditions.

Lukacs on the other hand directly imposed and promoted a radical cultural revolution in sexual morals.

- There is unfortunately no word that means "porn" in the context of political power, but there should be.

Possibly. The term 'character assassination' comes damn close though. As in the demonization of GWB (for all the WRONG reasons), Reagan (for all the imaginary ones), the TEA Party, Sarah Palin, Joe McCarthy, heteronormative marriage and Republicans. Certainly the nasty, public humiliation and destruction of all of these have spurred the morally adolescent equivalent of pseudo-intellectual happy endings for those wholly and personally invested in the "progressive" cause.

- Yo, don't be an easy target.

One of the OTHER popular documents on SSRN - Instapundit's 'Due Process when Everything is a Crime' - demonstrates that this is much easier said than done.

- In fact, this is the standard position of today's neo-communist on the USSR: fascist deviationism, not true communism.

Which dissembling only works, of course, if one accepts the notion of there being any practical difference - from the point of view of the vassals (and even the lords) - between totalitarian communism and totalitarian fascism. One usurps authority on behalf of an unbidden proletariat; the other on behalf of the an un genetic code. That the Supreme Soviet is utterly indistinguishable from La Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni in any way other than the language each used to enslave the people seems rarely, if ever, to occur.

Far left is to be found the Omnipotent State (totalitarianism); far right is the Nonexistent State (anarchy). Between THESE can be found every ideology dreamed up to date, unlike the current fantasy which sets Communism and Fascism in "opposition", and through the same magical thinking that gives us unicorns and sustainable social welfare programs, constructs Anarchy, Libertarianism and Self-Government through some sophistry of 'averaging' or 'compromise' between two totalitarian endpoints.

"You might be thinking of Engels's book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. That wasn't a tract about "sexual liberation." It was a book of historical materialist theory that explained social, family, and sexual relations as being products of economic, material conditions."

This is true. However, it is also true that Marx disparaged what he called "the claptrap of the bourgeois family," and Engels quipped that the only difference between marriage and prostitution was the duration of the contract.

Marxism, broadly speaking, objects to the family, and to all other mediating institutions that stand between the individual and the state, as vehicles for the perpetuation of inequality and privilege. Marx and Engels in the "Communist Manifesto" propose universal education of children under the auspices of the state, and the abolition of the rights of inheritance. These were direct attacks on the family, which traditionally had responsibility for the education of its children, and of which patrimony is as much a feature as matrimony.

The measures taken by Lucaks under the government of Bela Kun, and the wishes expressed by Marcuse in "Eros and Civilization" for a "change in the value and scope of libidinal relations" that "would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family," are logical developments from the antipathy to the family expressed by Marx and Engels.

The late William F. Buckley coined the phrase "vulgar Marxism" to describe those parts of Marxist dogma that had been absorbed into the popular culture, and which were often mouthed by persons who were quite unaware of their original source. An example might be that of the person who defends a graduated or "progressive" income tax on the grounds that earners of higher incomes had supposedly greater "ability to pay."

In like manner, we might describe modern feminism and the "gay marriage" movement as examples of vulgar Marcusianism. Probably very few of the feminists who prattle on about "patriarchy" ever read "Eros and Civilization." Similarly, how many of those who cavort in "Gay Pride" celebrations realize that Marcuse was rhapsodizing about a "resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality" that "protests against the repressive order of procreative sexuality" away back in 1955?

Sure it does. As someone pointed out above, Stalin's Russia experimented with free love early after the revolution's victory before he put a quash on it.

I don't see why that's worse.

Why is it worse. A great thing to ponder.

The reason Swedish and Euro Protestant nations' radical autonomy is politically worse than the Soviet experimentation with sexual debauchery is because the Protestant version is crazier.

There's no equivalent to Northwestern Europe's dedication to eliminate gender differences and promote gay rights in the Soviet Bloc.

Putting children under control of the state instead of the family at least makes logical sense from the perspective of totalitarianism. So does free sex as a way to get more revolutionaries to signup to the Communist party.

But radical gender autonomy flies in the face of biological reality even more so than Communist familial ideology.

This is important because if the governing philosophies of the "scientific" bureaucratic Western left - e.g., the Cathedral, the European Union, and the modern British Fabians - is crazier than Communism then we should expect the "nanny state" Western nations to ultimately become even worse to live under than Communist states.

America is communist, in Moldbug's sense, but it's not Communist. This is also the error that engineerscotty in Unz's comment section falls into. The American left demonstrably does not like Chinese or Soviet Communism.

Oh please. The American Left - and its political arm, the Cathedral - strove desperately to make a deal with the Soviets from 1933 to 1989. The efforts at appeasement never stopped.

And even if we accept that the American Left didn't "like" Soviet communism, how does that prove they're not Communist? The Soviets and ChiComs were at daggers drawn for decades and that didn't mean they weren't Communists.

In like manner, we might describe modern feminism and the "gay marriage" movement as examples of vulgar Marcusianism. Probably very few of the feminists who prattle on about "patriarchy" ever read "Eros and Civilization."

Marcuse and the Frankfurt School were and are relatively obscure. This is because the School's writings are dense and academic, even by Ivory tower standards. Marcuse became the best known Frankfurt member after he joined in on the 60s counter culture revolts, but few feminists would have read his work.

The feminists of current and previous eras would have been much more familiar with Betty Friedan, the homosexual Michel Foucault (who left the French Communist party in part because of Communism's hostility to gays) and Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

The American Left - and its political arm, the Cathedral - strove desperately to make a deal with the Soviets from 1933 to 1989.

Not entirely correct. From Truman to LBJ the Democrats were militantly gung-ho anti-Soviet. Franklin's regime, of course, was shot through with pro-Communist sympathizers and agents, not least of whom was the wheel chaired one himself.

how does that prove they're not Communist?

How they act matters. The scientific, bureaucratic Western left arguably acts so differently from the Soviets in terms of radical autonomy ideology that it should be classified as a separate branch of leftism rather than the same species, or even sub-species, of Communism.

"The feminists of current and previous eras would have been much more familiar with Betty Friedan, the homosexual Michel Foucault (who left the French Communist party in part because of Communism's hostility to gays) and Dr. Alfred Kinsey."

Betty Friedan, however, would have known who Marcuse was; so, probably, would Germaine Greer.

As for the militant homosexual types, Tony Kushner has acknowledged his debt to Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Adorno.

And of course there is Marcuse's most famous grad student, Angela Davis. Through her, Frankfurt School Marxism worked its malign influence on the so-called civil rights movement. This may be less important to its direction, though, than her place in a long line of influential negro communists extending from from W.E.B. DuBois to the present occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Friedan likely would have. But even among the most widely read cultural leftists, the Frankfurt School was less prominent an influence compared to Kinsey, Chomsky, Sartre, and the rest. In Friedan's case, Simone de Beauvoir was a far more significant influence than Frankfurt.

The School's intellectual impact on academia has been wildly blown out of all proportion by antisemites.

The measures taken by Lucaks under the government of Bela Kun, and the wishes expressed by Marcuse in "Eros and Civilization" for a "change in the value and scope of libidinal relations" that "would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family," are logical developments from the antipathy to the family expressed by Marx and Engels.

No, it's not a logical development of Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which was a work of historical materialist theory. Neither Lukacs nor Marcuse were following historical materialist theory in their activism and writing.

Also, while Engels was critical of, say, monogamy as being a product of capitalist materialism, he wasn't necessarily critical of it arising out of non-capitalist, "free", conditions. He believed that without capitalism, a more natural, purer form of monogamy would arise, among other things.

Geez... I must be way out in space, and going further every day.Roger Baldwin seemed a rather.. pertinent observer of soviet society, at the time he was making those observations, which is not.. our rabid, bipolar time, definitely.In a quote from Alain that appears in a book of conversations with a philosopher/journalist, with Jacques Bouveresse, a marginal French philosopher, Alain says that he has abandoned SOCIALISM as the misguided attempt to "solve" human problems from the top down, and not the bottom up.Socialism, and not.. communism (but it would be nice to debate about to what extent communism is a subcategory of socialism, and the relation between the two).In France, the two major party political system is heating up over the conflict between two.. opposing ways of looking at political power : the (what I call) SOCIALIST way which charges the individual voter to vote for.. "the program", i.e. the ideas, over and above the incarnated physical spokesman for "the program", or a party organized around a charismatic, flesh and blood INDIVIDUAL.The advantage of the not so feudal bureacratic system lies in its continuity.The advantage of the.. feudal.. loyalty to a charismatic individual lies in its capacity to appeal to hearts, minds, and.. passions, in a way that abstract, and dusty ideas can not. Except.. now that I think about it, when you turn your country into "LA France", with Marianne waving a flag, you can have the advantages of ideas and... people, through personnification. English has a hard time with personification, because it is a language without.. genre.Tough luck......I nevertheless believe that.. too much faith in Hobbes is damaging for one's ability to observe and think...And lucidity as the ultimate.. BOURGEOIS ideal ??No comment.

Just thought you'd like to know...One of Luther's major preoccupations in the Reform was to remove marriage from the category of the Catholic Church's... SACREMENTS, and make it into a CIVIL CONTRACT. (For FREEDOM'S sake, huh ? In passing, if we stopped gargling every two seconds with the "freedom/liberty" words, we might have time to do something besides wank.)That means... shifting the union between man and woman from the sacred sphere (remember.. "what God unites, let no man put asunder") to the CIVIL SPHERE, and setting up a legal CONTRACT system to organize it.A sacrement is something that is.. SACRED. Holy. In God's realm.A civil contract.. is NOT SACRED. So.. it is easier for men and women to wriggle out of what is put together in the civil sphere, than in the, uh, SACRED sphere.I like to say... gotta take them thar.. disadvantages along with the advantages.The homosexual marriage upset is about continuing the DESACRALIZATION of the union between man and woman, as much as it is about tampering with our perception of a "natural" (notice those quotation marks there...) union between man and woman. And what is desacralized... strenthens the CIVIL sphere. The sphere of the State.Balance of power...

" Neither Lukacs nor Marcuse were following historical materialist theory in their activism and writing."

I never said that they were. What I said was that their activism and writing was a logical development of the hostility that Marx and Engels exhibited toward the family, as an instrument for perpetuating inequality. This it did through the accumulation of private property, its transference via inheritance (which Marx and Engels proposed to abolish), and through the difference in families' abilities to educate their children (which Marx and Engels proposed to eliminate by establishing universal compulsory education under the auspices of the state). The "patriarchal family" was viewed, both by Marx and Engels and by Marcuse et al., as a stumbling block in the way of achieving the communist utopia they sought.

"The School's intellectual impact on academia has been wildly blown out of all proportion by antisemites."

TUJ, would you call Roger Kimball of "The New Criterion" an "anti-Semite"?

Not entirely correct. From Truman to LBJ the Democrats were militantly gung-ho anti-Soviet. Franklin's regime, of course, was shot through with pro-Communist sympathizers and agents, not least of whom was the wheel chaired one himself.

Nah. The Democrats had their pinko comsymp pro-detente wing even from Truman to LBJ. They just weren't very influential. Think Wallace, Stevenson, Bowles, Harriman, Eugene McCarthy, John Kenneth Galbraith, etc.

It keeps getting tossed down the memory hole that the Dem congress aid cutoff of early 1975 handed over South Vietnam to the Communists:

http://ngothelinh.tripod.com/Sleeping_With_The_Enemy.html(...)Then in early 1975 the Watergate Congress dealt non-Communist Indochina the final blow. The new Congress icily resisted President Gerald Ford’s January request for additional military aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia. This appropriation would have provided the beleaguered Cambodian and South Vietnamese militaries with ammunition, spare parts, and tactical weapons needed to continue their own defense. Despite the fact that the 1973 Paris Peace Accords called specifically for "unlimited military replacement aid" for South Vietnam, by March the House Democratic Caucus voted overwhelmingly, 189-49, against any additional military assistance to Vietnam or Cambodia.

The rhetoric of the antiwar Left during these debates was filled with condemnation of America’s war-torn allies, and promises of a better life for them under the Communism that was sure to follow. Then-Congressman Christopher Dodd typified the hopeless naiveté of his peers when he intoned that "calling the Lon Nol regime an ally is to debase the word.... The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now." Tom Downey, having become a foreign policy expert in the two months since being freed from his mother’s apron strings, pooh-poohed the coming Cambodian holocaust that would kill more than one-third of the country’s population, saying, "The administration has warned that if we leave there will be a bloodbath. But to warn of a new bloodbath is no justification for extending the current bloodbath."

On the battlefields of Vietnam the elimination of all U.S. logistical support was stunning and unanticipated news. South Vietnamese commanders had been assured of material support as the American military withdrew—the same sort of aid the U.S. routinely provided allies from South Korea to West Germany—and of renewed U.S. air strikes if the North attacked the South in violation of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. Now they were staring at a terrifyingly uncertain future, even as the Soviets continued to assist the Communist North.

As the shocked and demoralized South Vietnamese military sought to readjust its forces to cope with serious shortages, the newly refurbished North Vietnamese immediately launched a major offensive. Catching many units out of position, the North rolled down the countryside over a 55-day period. In the ensuing years I have interviewed South Vietnamese survivors of these battles, many of whom spent ten years and more in Communist concentration camps after the war. The litany is continuous: "I had no ammunition." "I was down to three artillery rounds per tube per day." "I had nothing to give my soldiers.." "I had to turn off my radio because I could no longer bear to hear their calls for help."(...)

"The School's intellectual impact on academia has been wildly blown out of all proportion by antisemites."

The Authoritarian Personality was by far the most influential work of the Frankfurt School:

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/007815.html(...) Paul Gottfried writes:You should read my last three books, all of which stress that The Authoritarian Personality profoundly affected American political thinking. It was essential to the postwar reconstruction of German “civic culture’ and the work was deeply admired by SM Lipset, the sponsors of Commentary, and scads of Cold War liberals. It was not necessarily viewed as the post-Marxist leftist source of moral corruption that I suggest it was in The Strange Death of Marxism. What made The Authoritarian Personality particularly insidious is that it was widely seen as a blueprint for non-totalitarian democracy both here and in Europe; and leaders in government and in universities read the book in that way. The fact that Adorno and Horkheimer (who later backed away from the implications of the work he had co-edited) were at the time Soviet sympathizers did not dampen the enthusiasm of the anti-Stalinist secularist intellectuals who tried to defend the study. Although the Jewish identity of the Frankfurt School may not have been the only factor leading to their anti-Christian, anti-fascist pseudo-science, denying its influence on the formation of Frankfort School ideas is simply silly.(...)Prof. Gottfried replies:Christopher Lash’s True and Only Heaven includes a long section detailing the mainstream liberal support for The Authoritarian Personality in the 1950s and 1960s. Lipset, Hook, Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Hofstadter and the members of American Jewish Committe, who sponsored Adorno and Commentary magazine, were among the anti-Communist liberals who admired TAP and who thought that it had relevance for our country. Although you and I may be to the right of these celebrants, it would be hard to argue that no anti-Communist had any use for Adorno’s ideas.(..)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality#Responses(...)Some observers have criticized what they saw as a strongly politicized agenda to The Authoritarian Personality. Social critic Christopher Lasch[26] argued that by equating mental health with left-wing politics and associating right-wing politics with an invented “authoritarian” pathology, the book's goal was to eliminate antisemitism by “subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy—by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum.” Similarly, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek wrote, “It is precisely the kind of group loyalty, respect for tradition, and consciousness of differences central to Jewish identity, however, that Horkheimer and Adorno described as mental illness in Gentiles. These writers adopted what eventually became a favorite Soviet tactic against dissidents: anyone whose political views differed from theirs was insane. […] Christian self-denial, and especially sexual repression, caused hatred of the Jews [according to Adorno et al.].”[27]The Authoritarian Personality remains widely cited in the social sciences and continues to inspire research interest today.[28]

"A sacrement is something that is.. SACRED. Holy. In God's realm.A civil contract.. is NOT SACRED. So.. it is easier for men and women to wriggle out of what is put together in the civil sphere, than in the, uh, SACRED sphere.I like to say... gotta take them thar.. disadvantages along with the advantages.The homosexual marriage upset is about continuing the DESACRALIZATION of the union between man and woman, as much as it is about tampering with our perception of a "natural" (notice those quotation marks there...) union between man and woman. And what is desacralized... strenthens the CIVIL sphere. The sphere of the State."

@Debra

I think this might be what caused my college roommate some problems with the Catholic Church when he married his secretary.

TUJ, would you call Roger Kimball of "The New Criterion" an "anti-Semite"?

Re: Kimball and Gottfried.

I don't know who Kimball is, but Gottfried is just wrong about the School's influence. I suspect he gets overstates the Frankfurt School because he's a niche intellectual who focuses too much on his own little echo chamber academic thought. And his paleocon universe the Frankfurt School is constantly refereed to.

If you use an quantitative measure, like Google Scholar, you'll see that Chomsky, Betty Friedan, Sartre, Kinsey's sexology terms, and others are more heavily referenced than Marcuse or the Frankfurt School.

There's just no good evidence the School stood out in a majority of academic minds more so than others. Gottfried lists Frankfurt as being a key influence on Denazification of Germany, but even this is dubious because just about every post-WWII liberal school of thought felt bourgeoisie conservatism was authoritarian. Th Soviets had been locking up anti-Communists in mental institutions before the Authoritarian personality came out.

I find it rather ironic that we are still looking at the world through the.. outdated blueprint of opposing Christianity and Judaism, and slugging it out over antisemitism, when, at this time, the emerging totalitarianism which, like other twentieth century totalitarianisms, has roots going back to the early Christian Church, and the Gospels, is busy attacking the COMMON values of Judaism and Christianity.We are rather short sighted on this one, aren't we ?The family as we know it, was largely shaped by the medieval Church empire in Western Europe.One of my Canadian friends tells me that the new primary school manuels will have no reference to boys and girls in order to not influence our "pure" children, and permit them to be "free" to CHOOSE their sexual "orientation"...The new totalitarianism is in actions like this.And it is directed against both Jewish AND Christian traditional values...

1. Mark Flowers is a true dedicated Christian but a non denominational and non church going Christian, a praying man upon his knees and he gives all credit to his survival to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as his savoir and protector of him and his loved ones. Mark has to continually break all curses in Jesus Christ’s name, sent by witch craft and the Satanic agenda.

2. Mark Flowers is a fighter, a man that will never bow to any evil corruption, to DEATH.

3. Mark Flowers has had the fatherhood of his children stolen by the masons / system / The Australian Government.

4. Mark Flowers is a survivor of more than a decade of intense murderous Freemasonry Gang Stalking {a term he coined} and raised in the Federal Magistrates Court Parramatter Sydney Australia in 2009 & 2010 whilst defending his rights to father his children.

5. Mark Flowers has had so many attempts on his life in the process of Freemasonry gangstalking that they are too numerous to list, most have been whilst driving in road traffic accident setups by gangstalkers . But all manner of threats have come against Mark Flowers, One time a sour mason wielding a hammer at Mark’s head got a lesson in respect and kicked off Mark’s property. The police always fail to follow such death threats against Mark Flowers.

6. Mark Flowers has self-represented in some 60 appearances in the Federal Magistrates Court, the District Court and the Supreme Court in Australia and all with nil formal education, in fact Mark left school at 14 years and first job was in a lumber yard.

7. Mark Flowers is a Father first, and a former children’s safety film producer, but the dogs of gangstalking were released on him for doing so. Mark has been fighting ever since and will never give in, as the eternity in spirit and fear of God through Christ Jesus motivates him to be fearless against evil.

If I fall in this good fight it will be into the arms of my saviour Jesus Christ.

Democracy is the answer to Davos Man and the Cathedral. By answer I mean solution.

Um, the Cathedral knows how to defeat democracy. Firstly, they team up with the NAMs to outvote the white proles. If that doesn't work, they nullify the outcome of the vote using their Black Robed Arbiters.

@ Phil, who wrote "It's not a logical development of Engels's historical materialism.(...)"

Your approach to this discussion is reminiscent of a member of one of some broadly-defined religion's "four-and-twenty warring sects" (to borrow a phrase) who refuses to recognize any of the other twenty-three as his co-religionists, because of their failure to adhere to some credal punctilio that his sect regards as the sine qua non of the faith. He sees only difference, while someone who is not a member of any of the sects would see that all twenty-four of them agree on many more tenets than they disagree about.

Engels derived the title of his book "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" from the claim of the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, in the latter's book "Ancient Society" (1877), that the family, private property, and the state did not exist in prehistoric times. Morgan divided human existence into three epochs, viz., savagery, barbarism, and civilisation. He claimed that primitive societies were matriarchal and communal. This corresponded to Marx's concept of "primitive communism." The concept of private property, Morgan held, grew up together with the patriarchal family. Engels also drew on the writings of Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose work "Das Mutterecht" (1861) underlay the work of Morgan.

In 1972 an English translation of "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" was published with an introduction by an American feminist called Evelyn Reed. She wrote that women who were "organizing and acting to end the deep-rooted discrimination against the female sex" wanted to know "how their oppression originated and whether it always existed." She pointed to Engels's book for the explanation. She summarized it as follows:

"Civilized society is founded on the private ownership of property; it is class-divided, with a wealthy possessing class exploiting the working mass. A state apparatus enforced this rule of the rich. It is characterized by inequalities of all kinds, economic, social, and sexual. Male supremacy and female inferiority are integral features of this patriarchal class system.

"In savage society, there was no compulsory family institution with the father in command, exacting subservience, obedience, and conformity from wife and children..."

"The family in the true definition of the term is a father family, a socio-economic institution that subjects procreation o male-made regulations, restrictions, and laws..."

"The replacement of the oppressive systyem of capitalism by a new order that will remake human relations from top to bottom is the ultimate road to female liberation. In Marxist terms, that is socialism."

Now, it may be that Ms. Reed is not an orthodox historical materialist, any more than Marcuse was in "Eros and Civilization." However, it is clear in both cases that they derive their inspiration from Marx and Engels, and this ought to be sufficient from the standpoint of anyone not adhering to some narrow sectarian concept of Marxism to identify their views as fundamentally Marxist.

If we, correctly, know Hitler ordered the Holocaust even though there's no official written documentation, then we must also conclude FDR was a Communist agent for similar reasons: Franklin's henchmen couldn't have committed crimes that large without explicit, direct, but non-written orders from the Numero Uno.

Well, we assume FDR didn't write down official orders for his Cabinet because, as M wrote, the American archives have yet to be opened like those in Berlin and, to a lesser extent, Moscow.

So FDR was not a double agent, but a triple agent. He was superficially the president of the United States while also being a Communist agent and a progressive agent (progressive is NOT Communist, Moldberg, as progressivism has now proved to be crazier than Ye Olde Hammer & Sickle by a Galaxy or two).

Indeed, if we remember Franklin did nothing to little to stop the Holocaust (the guard towers at Auschwitz, Treblinka, et al were barely scrached by allied bombs) then we could consider him in a quadruple agent with him in bed with Woodrow Wilson, and twirling Hitler and Stalin's mustaches.

And Roosevelt is almost universally hailed as a hero, much as Adolf would have been if he hadn't been foolhardy enough to wage war against the greatest criminal and psychopath of the 20th century.

On second thought, the competition for greatest 20th century criminal is a tie for first place between FDR and the EU's Jean Monnet.

The Brussels crew has inflicted suffering on Southern Europe that would be considered tantamount to an act of full scale war by any pre-1945 government.

And Brussels has accomplished all of this destruction and terror without resorting to military force. If the EU had loyal armies, their death toll would make Hitler and Stalin seem like third-string bank robbers by comparison.

Brussels doesn't have to resort to military force.For several reasons.Because, most of my friends, and most of you, over there in the mother country really can't, don't or won't understand why your PERSONAL INDIVIDUAL conviction, or belief in God, why your individual behavior in going to Church or not, is really irrelevant with respect to the enormous historical weight of over 2000 years of Monotheism.In a context where your ancestors believed and practiced for so many years before you, just how much do.. YOU and what you think count ?? (you count, definitely, but perhaps less than you think...)Europe, and its peoples are caught in the throes of a boundless.. guilt about having HAD too much...Being privileged. Exacerbated once again by that insufferable outbreak of egalitarianism, whose roots go right back to, not Engels, not Luther, etc, but the Gospels, and the early Christian Church, as I keep repeating. When you reach the top, the only way is down. (Rather logical, that, nevertheless.)The Jewish Bible frames human life in an alternance of periods of frugal observance of God's tenets, and... profligate perods of dissipation for which THE PEOPLE are punished.You can't believe the weight of guilt in Europe...Who needs... military force when the People have interiorized guilt ??This is only one side of the story, of course...There are.. other sides too.

if we remember Franklin did nothing to little to stop the Holocaust (the guard towers at Auschwitz, Treblinka, et al were barely scrached by allied bombs)

Meh. The Allies could not have prevented or even seriously hindered the Holocaust through strategic bombing. The most likely outcome would be to do the Nazis work for them when Allied bombs missed their targets and killed countless Jewish inmates.

Undiscovered Jew, unlike Tocqueville, I have spent over 30 years in France observing on a day to day basis the extremely subtle heritage of Christian guilt, and the way it plays out in French society, despite occasional ugly outbreaks, admittedly. (The referendum a prelude to an ugly outbreak ? Maybe, maybe... the other ugly outbreaks have taken place on.. European soil, and not New World soil, after all, and physical place is extremely important, regardless of our excessively.. Jewish ? tendancy to play it down. Tocqueville observed how fickle the French are, and how prone they are to sudden, violent outbursts. From Scylla to Charybdis in two seconds top chrono.)The way the French, globally are STILL looking for someone to tell them what to think, and do, despite loud clamorings to the contrary.The way the French revolution, far from destroying this manner of being in the world, actually consolidated it, by putting a tawdry veneer over it, and proclaiming it officially ended.You must admit that the guilt involved in killing your King, the official representative of God's will in your political system, his flesh and blood incarnation, can be intense, particularly in a strong, highly centralized nation state ?Can you.. expiate such an act ?And.. can you kill.. "the King" by killing the King ?Any more than you can kill.. "the Jew" by killing.. the Jews ?And you must remember that once again... the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of their sons are rotten.Dixit the Bible.The sons, they pay for their fathers' guilt.Whether we want to believe it or not.Even self made men pay for their fathers' guilt...Ironic, huh ?Your personal, individual WILL doesn't accomplish everything in this world. Far from it. Why does the world work this way ?Because by making yourself your own origin, you cut yourself off from the possibility of receiving from your fathers, and in consequence.. from transmitting when you too, shall be.. a father...You sap the historical continuity (memory) of your society...And then, transmission becomes an enormous problem.Because transmission involves more than taking online courses over the Internet, or reading countless Wikipedia articles in order to "learn".It involves having your heart and mind mobilized by a flesh and blood person who will.. transmit his/her enthousiasm to you, along with knowledge.Believe me... Christian guilt in France, at least, is still intense. Among people who don't know the first thing about their religious heritage.Le comble de l'ironie..

@ Debra, who wrote: "Being privileged. Exacerbated once again by that insufferable outbreak of egalitarianism, whose roots go right back to, not Engels, not Luther, etc, but the Gospels, and the early Christian Church, as I keep repeating."

I have often heard people say this, but it seems to me that there is little evidence of an egalitarian influence from Christianity during the period when Europe was actually ruled by Christian kings - let us say, from the time of Charlemagne's coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in AD 800, up through the start of World War I.

Christianity may have preached humility, penitence, and asceticism throughout this period, but it did not advocate the political equality of all people in this world. The only exceptions were extreme outliers like mad John of Leyden, whose brief reign was quickly ended, or the Levellers and Diggers of the English interregnum - who were even then a tiny minority, the fringe of the Protestant fringe.

It is only in the period after Christianity began its decline in the 19th century that we begin to see nominal Christians embracing political egalitarianism, and even then they were forcibly opposed (see, for example, Bl. Pius IX's "Syllabus of Errors"). It has been only since the mid-twentieth century that "mainstream" Protestant denominations, and to some extent the R.C. Church, have made political egalitarianism an article of faith. That this is a marked departure from historic Christianity is undeniable.

The second way the hard left and the Davos left differ is how power is traced through their respective systems.

The exercise of all political power in Communist Russia was easily traceable back to a single Communist dictator during Stalin's reign, not at all unlike the Tsarist system. They even copied the best practices of the Romanov's intelligence services.

After Stalin, authority in Moscow could be followed in a neat linear line towards an oligarchical network. The Soviet Premier normally held the most power of any oligarch while major shareholders in the Politburo retained the rest.

Stalin's Russia and post-Stalin Communism wasn't at all unlike pre and post-Fronde France: Before the Fronde, France was an oligarchical structure with substantial power entrusted in local aristocrats at the expense of Paris. Post-Fronde France was more centralized at the expense of local royals, but still not nearly as centralized as 20th century Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, New Deal America and Jean Monnet's EU Europe.

Now we come to the Davos structure. The Davos structure is exceptional in it's diabolical nature because power and governmental actions cannot be followed through to a single ruler or clique of major shareholders. Power in New Deal America and the EU is distributed through multiple power nodes of mindless bureaucracy that have no end or beginning.

Yet, these individual nodes act collectively to serve the interests of the Left. How do they do accomplish this sans centralized leadership?

The various pillars of the Cathedral act jointly because they share a common incentive structure. And that incentive is to create more bureaucracy by designing policies that are guaranteed to fail such as non-white immigration, global warming, and even low fat diets.

When the liberals fail they become stronger because they then demand more power for their regulatory boards and scientific administrators to fix the problems they either caused or made worse.

Incompatible races prove to be shitty immigrants? This is the fault of white racism, which can be corrected by giving the EEOC, HUD, and college diversiKrats billions more in your tax dollars.

High carb diets caused an unprecedented obesity epidemic? Give the FDA and Health and Human Services more regulatory authority to discourage high fat diets.

Because the New Deal and EU Federalism incentived failure no matter who was in power, thanks to "good government" reforms that severed the link between elected leadership and the Civil Service, the Civil Service answers to no one and can devote it's full energy to expanding itself into ever more areas of life.

Notice that Communists did not have microregulate society to the extent the West because the Communists held absolute power.

In the Cathedral, no single agency has complete control over it's own jurisdiction. The Cathedral agencies only have INFLUENCE. Influence is not POWER.

The EPA has influence over environmental policy. But so does Michael Mann. And the New York Times. And Harvard.

But none of them hold final power over enviro policy. Because the Cathedral organs and agents each want deciding power over policy, they compete with one another for influence. And the way you gain influence and, hopefully, power in New Deal America is by expanding into more areas of life. There is no exit condition for the New Deal infinite technocratic loop.

This micromanagement was not a problem in Stalin's Russia. Stalin was the final authority on any and all matters of state. The Red Tsar was Tsar. As Tsar, Stalin didn't have to posture for more influence because he retained 110% of power. His comfort with power freed him to focus on major policies and ignore pursuing micropolicies to impress, INFLUENCE, other Soviet apparatchik.

If a given Russian policy, say, Communist revolutionary expansion ("R"), were the dependent variable and Stalin were the independent variable (we'll call him the "S" variable) then the S variable explains 100% of the effect on the R variable.

In New Deal America, there is no single independent variable of large effect on our dependent policy variables.

Take the Green dependent variable (G) to stand for global warming. Harvard (H) explains 4% of the effect on our G variable. The New York Times 5%. Michael Mann 4%. The Jewish variable (J), of course has no detectable influence on policy whatsoever thanks to perfect multicolinearity with the liberal WASP variable (WASP).

For you proles, that means the effect of the J nor the WASP variables can be distinguished from each other in our political regression model. But you that, didn't you my niggers.

Crawfurdmuir, how long has Christianity been declining ??Consider that Philippe le Bel back in 1400 or so broke the military Templiers in order to confiscate their considerable wealth, influence, and power.Consider that the French nation state arose on the ashes of a medieval Christian.. empire ? where the monastic structures were quite powerful (not just the Seigneurs...).The influence of Christianity as a religious belief system has been steadily declining at the same time that the ideology that is propped up on Jesus's teachings has been gaining strength, in order to replace it. (I think that is why rabid Republicans, and some.. thinking people are critical of Renaissance humanism, which commences glorifying man... Right now, we are dedicated to glorifying man AT THE EXPENSE of God, and not glorifying both, but Renaissance humanism got us started in this direction.)I maintain that egalitarianism is the bedrock of the Gospels.Think about Jesus... teaching/enlightening Mary (a woman...) in her house, while Martha gripes about doing the cooking.Think about Jesus hanging out with moneylenders, and people from all walks of life.The Reformation is about the people getting access to the Book, in order to judge.. for themselves about what is in it.The Reformation is about having the Book disseminated in the languages of the people, in order to judge what is in it.The Reformation is about not having to go through a middleman (priest) in order to.. judge/do for oneself what others were doing before, IN YOUR PLACE, and in your stead.And you forgot the French Revolution, which is Act II to the swelling tragedy.Long before the 19th century, and WW1/2.As for political equality, that is in the desacralized sphere.When you are already promoting spiritual equality, you are a hair's breath away from taking the whole shebang out of the spiritual sphere, and letting it invade... your politics.(The Renaissance pope Julius 2,( I think..) was very instrumental in moving the world in this direction.)Enough from ignorant old me...

I guess sharing a comfy cell with a philosopher such as Andrew Berwick isn't that bad, but somehow I don't think Snowden has any idea where the government of the "independent" country of Norway really stands.

I'm surprised he didn't ask ayatollah Khamenei for asylum, that's who I would ask if I were him and Russia and China wouldn't be that eager to have me.

"Your approach to this discussion is reminiscent of a member of one of some broadly-defined religion's "four-and-twenty warring sects" (to borrow a phrase) who refuses to recognize any of the other twenty-three as his co-religionists, because of their failure to adhere to some credal punctilio that his sect regards as the sine qua non of the faith. He sees only difference, while someone who is not a member of any of the sects would see that all twenty-four of them agree on many more tenets than they disagree about."

"Now, it may be that Ms. Reed is not an orthodox historical materialist, any more than Marcuse was in "Eros and Civilization." However, it is clear in both cases that they derive their inspiration from Marx and Engels, and this ought to be sufficient from the standpoint of anyone not adhering to some narrow sectarian concept of Marxism to identify their views as fundamentally Marxist."

We're not talking about "faith" or "inspiration". People can claim to be "inspired" by anything. We're talking about the logical implications of a specific theory, namely historical materialism. The fact of the matter is that neither Lukacs nor Marcuse's writing and activism were logical developments of Engels' historical materialism. Just as, say, environmental interventionism is not a logical development of Darwinism. Contemporary environmental interventionists also claim to be Darwinists and inspired by "science". But that's ultimately irrelevant. It doesn't matter if they are inspired by Darwinism and "science". Their views still aren't logical developments of Darwinism.

@ Debra, who wrote - "The Reformation is about not having to go through a middleman (priest) in order to.. judge/do for oneself what others were doing before, IN YOUR PLACE, and in your stead.And you forgot the French Revolution, which is Act II to the swelling tragedy."

From my perspective, the Reformation was mainly about the wish of secular princes to have their way with the church, and to lay hands on its wealth. This they had wished to do at least since the time of Henry II (the English one, not the French one), as is evident from the Constitutions of Clarendon. Magna Charta, with its insistence that the Church be independent, was as much a reaction to this, and to Henry's demand to be rid of "that turbulent priest" Thomas à Becket, as it was to any particular abuses of his younger son, king John.

Rivalry between the monarchs of Europe and the jurisdictional claims of the papacy is seen not only in this case, but also in that of Philip the Fair (which you pointed out), and in that between Guelph and Ghibelline. The Reformation is only a continuation of these matters. Consider the Swedish reformation, which began because of a dispute between Gustavus Vasa and the papacy about who should have a bishopric. Gustavus was displeased by the obduracy of the pope, so he simply declared the church in Sweden "reformed." Nonetheless, it went along as usual in the parishes, where hardly any change was noticed. The Swedes did not accept the Augsburg confession until about 1590, and then it was only a matter of diplomatic convenience that prompted them to do so.

In France and many of the other countries that remained Roman Catholic, the same issues of control over the church and its revenues arose, and matters were resolved by concordats that gave kings control over the appointment of bishops to sees within their realms. From the kings' standpoints, doing so was to them no more than an application of the same principle by which a local squire or laird had the right of presentation (the "advowson") to the parish church serving his demesne.

All of these matters are essentially political, and not religious. While some of what you say might apply to the Calvinist and Zwinglian offshoots of the Reformation, it certainly did not within the Lutheran and Anglican branches. Within them - and, in time, within much of Calvinism - the great old Anglican hymn, "All Things Bright and Beautiful," came to be sung by the ordinary folk in the pews with some frequency. I draw your attention to its third verse:

"The rich man in his castle,The poor man at his gate,God made them high and lowly,And ordered their estate."

This view was far more common amongst ordinary Christians throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, than any sort of radical egalitarianism. In this country, that sort of egalitarianism first took its root in the Unitarian churches of New England, and amongst other persons who could scarcely be considered Christian at all. Unfortunately it has spread, but in terms of what historically was accepted as sound belief both by Protestants and Catholics, it is definitely heterodox.

As for the French revolution - it surely was a tragedy, but it can hardly be blamed on Christianity. If Christianity is to be held responsible for it, why did Robespierre work so hard to destroy the church in France? And why were the Vendéens, pious Catholics that they were, a counterrevolutionary force?

Surely the French revolution has to be viewed as a sort of momentary irruption. To be sure, it was a portent of what was to happen in Russia in 1917, but it did not really stick. The revolutionaries could not hold on to power, and eventually they were succeeded by Buonaparte, who was at least a competent dictator. He (like Henry of Navarre before him, and Mussolini after him) found it convenient to make his peace with the church; and certainly the great majority of the French people remained simple, observant Catholics all along, whatever may have been the doings of their political masters. It is fair to say that (apart from a few of the intelligentsia) they remained so well into the twentieth century.

France's real problem is the failure of any of its governments since the regicide of Louis XVI to be accepted as legitimate by a sufficient number of Frenchmen. This is why it has had in the past two and a quarter centuries two monarchies, two empires, five republics, and one fascist state. Sad though this may be, it isn't really religious in origin.

So you say. However, Evelyn Reed, feminist and soi-disant Marxist, says differently. And surely Marcuse regarded himself as a Marxist, and would have said differently. Why should I accept your view as more authoritative than theirs?

Marxism is basically a surrogate religion. Its notion of an historical dialectic (borrowed from Hegel) and its reliance on this supposed law of historical processes is deeply metaphysical. It is interesting to the dispassionate student of the phenomenon to consider the way in which arguments between various schools of Marxism resemble those that proliferate between the adherents of other sects sharing a common core of belief, but differing on specific points. I will leave to the 'theologians' of these various denominations of Marxism the characteristic splitting of hairs as to who is or is not an orthodox Marxist.

To reiterate my earlier point, with more specific terminology: there are those who will argue (as they did during the last presidential campaign) that "Mormons are not Christians." They might say, for example, that Mormons do not accept the Athanasian creed, and this excludes them from being considered Christian. On the other hand, the official name by which the Mormons call themselves is "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints," and Jesus Christ occupies a central place in their scheme of belief. From the latter point of view, they are at least as Christian as were the Nestorians, the Valentinians, the Monophysites, or any other ancient heterodox splinter of Christianity, and are validly considered part of the phenomenon we call Christianity.

In like manner, Lukacs, Marcuse, and Reed considered themselves Marxist, cited works (like that of Engels previously mentioned) as theoretical support for their positions, and are generally considered adherents of a variety of Marxism. Accordingly, speaking as a non-Marxist, it suffices for me that there are adequate similarities between the thinking Marx and Engels on one hand and of Lukacs, Marcuse, and Reed on the other, to identify the latter as Marxists.

TUJ is too busy spamming LOTB with "defund the Cathedral with MOOC" comments

That is not spam, it's effective political activity. As we speak, 10 state college systems are joining with Coursera to offer credit for online classes. Udacity is partnering with Georgia Tech to offer an entirely online masters in CS.

If you thought we're here to engage in purely theory and not application, you're sorely mistaken.

As we speak, Moldbug is organizing the Egyptian military to bring down democratic forces of Mohamed Morsi.

I never said that Lukacs, Marcuse et al weren't Marxists or that they didn't consider themselves to be Marxists, inspired by Marxism, etc.

I said that neither Lukacs nor Marcuse's writing and activism were logical developments of Engels's views on social, family, sexual relations, etc., which were inextricably tied to his historical materialism.

"I said that neither Lukacs nor Marcuse's writing and activism were logical developments of Engels's views on social, family, sexual relations, etc., which were inextricably tied to his historical materialism."

But you said this as if in refutation of my point, which was that they were logical developments of Marx's and Engels's ANTIPATHY TO THE FAMILY. Deny this if you will - the evidence is against you. As noted, Marx denounced "the claptrap of the bourgeois family," while Engels quipped that the only difference between marriage and prostitution was the duration of the contract. Further, Engels believed that matriarchy was characteristic of primitive societies in which property was communal, and that private property developed under patriarchy. Clearly someone like Evelyn Reed associated her feminist views with this, and concluded that Marxian socialism was the "answer" to the concerns of feminists.

Not only Lukacs under the regime of Bela Kun, but also the early Bolsheviks in Russia, dispensed with laws relating to marriage, divorce, abortion, and sexual activity, believing them to be relics of the old bourgeois order and incompatible with Marxism. Clearly they had a reason for so doing in the theoretical corpus provided by their prophets Marx and Engels.

The atmosphere of libertinism in early Bolshevik Russia was one of its attractions for Walter Duranty, the New York Times's great apologist for Soviet communism. He had earlier sated his goatish urges by participating in orgies with Aleister Crowley, but quickly transferred his allegiance to a Greater Beast in Moscow.

After several years of such policies, the birth rate in the Workers' Paradise plummeted, and Stalin reintroduced the old laws of marriage and divorce, and restricted abortion, as part of a pro-natalist policy. This was of course one of the points of divergence between the Frankfurt school and orthodox Marxism-Leninism.

Crawfurdmuir..What is the difference between an ideology, and belief in it, and an organized religion ?Any heresy will prop itself up on what it splits from.It will define itself IN RELATION TO, even if that relation is.. an opposite, because it has no choice.Marxism is a form of.. ideological heresy, stemming from Christian ideals. Even if it is hostile to the family that the medieval church was largely responsible for creating. (Remember what Jesus said when his mama asked him to drop by in Nazareth, and he was so.. rude to her...)I would say.. corrupted Christian ideals.By corruption, I mean the ongoing process by which the words.. keep shifting in meaning, and carrying us further down the road. Whether we like it or not.Look at the word "science" and what it meant in 1000. And look at what it means now..Now tell me how it got from there to here ?

How can it be a joke if Morsi's been overthrown? Another victory for the Galactic Empire over the evil Republic. Now, if only Moldberg can rush weapons to Assad to head off the forces of freedom and liberty at the pass...

You sure Morsi stood for freedom just because Obama initially supported him? I think the reason the generals took control again is the Cathedral realized Morsi was planning on turning Egypt into a rogue state.

You sure Morsi stood for freedom just because Obama initially supported him?

By freedom I meant Morsi and Obama stood with the majority opinion of civilian Egyptians that they should be able to freely vote for the extermination of the Copts. And pull other pranks a people incapable of handling freedom tend to pull.

I think the reason the generals took control again is the Cathedral realized Morsi was planning on turning Egypt into a rogue state.

Since Obama, like the Cathedral, supports anything that leads to the disintegration of order, and since the junta is on the least destructive faction in Egypt, we may conclude the coup occurred despite Obama's wishes, not because of it.

The generals ought to be grateful they're dealing with late stage Wilsonians when USG is less capable than ever of inflicting harm on disobedient allies.

New Deal America and Jean Monnet's European Union were created by and operate according to an incentive structure that rewards all Cathedral members when they empower their unaccountable, and now completely out of control, Civil Services.

Because the American left responds to an incentive structure, power can't be traced back to a single ruler or collection of oligarchs because nobody has final say, power over policy. Individual Cathedral members have influence. Despite having no empowered leadership, the collective influence of the progressive left cohesively fights for liberal policies as a system because all Cathedral party members benefit when the Cathedral becomes stronger.

Take global warming. The progressives in both America and Europe, without prompting from any overarching leader, spontaneously rally to "Fight Climate Change". How do they if there's no central leadership for them to report to as the KGB had to report to Stalin?

They do so through the Cathedral's incentive structure which rewards "fighting" climate change tby making bureaucratic agencies they work more powerful. The media demonizes big business and wins reporting awards for "fighting big polluters". Academia gets more research funding for green departments and indoctrinates students into the new policy which keeps the policy going into the future. Federal workers get more authority to overregulate business activity. Public and private sector unions have more tax revenue to elect Democrat officials and run "special interest" ads. Think tanks get to awards for telling the Cathedral what it wants to hear, etc. This holds for all of their other failed policies, everything from non-white immigration to high carb diets follows this sequence diagram.

Forget the Democrats. The Ds, like the Res, is a legislative dummy terminal. Under the American electoral system the parties exist only to serve their sponsors. Hence, they're only as strong as their sponsors. If the Democrats are strong, it is only because the Cathedral is strong. If the Cathedral becomes weaker under the great hammer blows of Mencist Politiphysik, the Democrats will be weak. If the Cathedral implodes, the Democrats will swiftly be reduced to an outlaw criminal party.

Likewise, a third party will never make a dent in American politics even if it displaces the Republicans. A successful third party would simply be absorbed by the Republican party's patrons and in time operate the same way the current GOP does.

Back to the Cathedral. How do we shut it down if it can't be defeated through elections?

We can't focus on individual members or organizations of the Cathedral because if that individual or organization is successfully attacked, some other part of the Cathedral will take up its influence. The system of the Cathedral would operate as before. Shut down Harvard and you merely replace Harvard for Yale or Princeton. Shut down Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and you get Stanford. Etc.

The way to defeat the Cathedral is to defeat it's incentive structure, cause a system wide failure of major Cathedral processes. I define a Cathedral process as one the interactive system's core functions that supports the functioning of the rest, such as academia, media, unions, government workers, think tanks, etc. Not specific organizations or individuals within those processes.

Shutting down a particular, major university won't be more than a minor hiccup in core Cathedral operations. A system wide vulnerability of the academic process would be giving college credit for online learning. Accredited online education cuts the cost of college to the point where existing, competing universities would not be able to stay in business unless they cut labor expenses to the bone by laying off faculty members.

Another system wide vulnerability would be to resurrect Andrew Jackson's spoils system and end the independence of the federal workforce by making all non-defense, non-law enforcement government workers subject to unilateral dismissal by the president who would then submit replacements for a vote in Congress. A neo-spoils system would sever the incentive government workers have to support the Cathedral because it would end their independence and make them creatures of the executive.

When you start viewing the Cathedral as processes that have to be shut down, the path to victory at last comes into view.

[quote]By freedom I meant Morsi and Obama stood with the majority opinion of civilian Egyptians that they should be able to freely vote for the extermination of the Copts. [/quote]

In short Morsi opposed multicultural diversity?

I think that reactionaries should make up their minds about whether Islamism is reactionary or progressive.

To me Islamism seems clearly reactionary. It disavows the entirety of the modern world and opposes all the things (democracy, feminism, gay rights, diversity, freedom of speech) that progressives support and reactionaries likewise oppose.

That even reactionaries don't like it perhaps shows that they themselves despise Reaction when observed in its actuality, as opposed to fantasies.

"What is the difference between an ideology, and belief in it, and an organized religion ?"

I suppose it depends upon how you define ideology. Certainly there are ideologies that resemble religions in many respects. Donoso Cortés pointed out that as religion declined in its importance to people, politics increased it its, and the 'odium theologicum' attached itself to political differences.

Marxism is certainly an example of a religion-like ideology, if it is not indeed a religion itself. It might be objected that Marxism is atheist. However, belief in a Supreme Being is not the sine qua non of a religion. Buddhism is, strictly speaking, atheist - yet no one denies that it is a religion. The ineluctable course of history as understood by the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic is as much a metaphysical and ultimately religious concept as the Buddhist law of karma.

On the other hand, there are ideologies (or at least political sympathies) that cannot be said to have any religious component. Monarchism, for example, has been compatible with many religions; while some versions of it view the monarch as having quasi-sacerdotal status, others do not. Similarly, aristocracy has coexisted with all sorts of religions and needs none at all to justify it - only the observation our senses enable us to make that people are naturally unequal, and that those who are the "best" at whatever a given society values typically end up in charge of it.

"Marxism is a form of.. ideological heresy, stemming from Christian ideals."

But so was gnosticism. Eric Voegelin said that Marxism was a form of gnosticism. If this is what you're saying, it certainly has its merits - although most scholars of antique gnosticism disagree with Voegelin.

"I think that reactionaries should make up their minds about whether Islamism is reactionary or progressive.

To me Islamism seems clearly reactionary. It disavows the entirety of the modern world and opposes all the things (democracy, feminism, gay rights, diversity, freedom of speech) that progressives support and reactionaries likewise oppose.

That even reactionaries don't like it perhaps shows that they themselves despise Reaction when observed in its actuality, as opposed to fantasies."

I can't even read this steaming pile without being sarcastic. *Of course* any movement that behaves in the opposite way to certain varieties of progressive society is reactionary!

So what if these "Islamists" in Egypt think "gay rights" are ridiculous? So does Fidel Castro; does that make him reactionary?

So what if these "Islamists" oppose democracy? Have they attempted to construct a more sensible form of government that isn't beholden to such inconstant nonsense as the "the true will of the people" or "the true will of Allah?" I think it's too early to tell, but I'm certainly hot holding my breath.

If it riots in the streets, loots museums of antiquity and terrorizes infidels, it ain't Louis XIV (civilized rulers deport infidels, if they must deal with them). Just because reactionary writers have had quite nice things to say about some Islamic kingdoms and empires, and think that the current pack of vermin in the Middle East are disgusting doesn't make them muddle-headed or inconstant. It means that you wouldn't know conflation fallacy if it bit you in the eyeball socket.

"To me Islamism seems clearly reactionary. It disavows the entirety of the modern world and opposes all the things (democracy, feminism, gay rights, diversity, freedom of speech) that progressives support and reactionaries likewise oppose".

"Reactionary" has to be defined as to time and place. As a reactionary who is part of Western civilisation, I take the view that Charles Martel, Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bouillon, Hugh Magnus, the Sieur de la Vallette, don John of Austria, King Jan Sobieski, and Prince Eugène of Savoy were on our side - the Muslims were not. My reaction looks back to them, not to the enemy. That Muslims hate modern Western society is not a function of its democracy, egalitarianism, tolerance for sexual deviance, etc. They hate us for what we were, perhaps more than for what we are.

"That even reactionaries don't like it perhaps shows that they themselves despise Reaction when observed in its actuality, as opposed to fantasies."

What we hate is barbarianism, not reaction. Learn to distinguish the two.

More interesting is whether the coup was green lighted by USG or if they were surprised.

We know John Kerry was yachting when the overthrow got underway. On the surface at least, this indicates USG was caught off balance. An increasingly easy and frequent stunt for foreigners to pull off.

But we can't determine this only by observing Kerry because the Cathedral's civil service can't be traced back towards a locus of actual power. When Soviet Russia's foreign service responded to any event surrounding Egypt's Nasser there was 100% confidence the Russian foreign ministry's response reflected the will of identifiable actors in Moscow. Not so DC where nobody since FDR is a leader and everyone is an unaccountable adviser.

Kerry only has influence, not power. And not much influence at that. But it's greater than 0 and more than the average voter. But still not enough influence to say whether his slothful reaction time was reflective of the Cathedral's real-time knowledge of the anti-Morsi plotters.

However, the civil service does do ceremonies. As Kerry is a ceremonial minister we would have expected Kerry to at least have performed his ceremonial demonstration of the State Dept's pseudo-power to support or oppose the coup in a venue other than a yacht so USG could at least pretend following the situation.

Given that Kerry failed completely to even pretend to be representing a sovereign American position in front of a teleprompter - something federal bureaucrats have up till now excelled at - we can conclude USG had no position on the plot because the coup leaders (wisely) never informed us one existed.

To me Islamism seems clearly reactionary. It disavows the entirety of the modern world and opposes all the things (democracy, feminism, gay rights, diversity, freedom of speech) that progressives support and reactionaries likewise oppose.

That even reactionaries don't like it perhaps shows that they themselves despise Reaction when observed in its actuality, as opposed to fantasies.

Yes, of course Islamism is reactionary. Islam in general has always been identified as reactionary. Western writers in the past identified it as such.

Reactionaries don't have to like something just because it's reactionary. But just because reactionaries don't like something doesn't mean it's not reactionary.

Also many self-styled reactionaries today are actually liberals or libertarians who are upset with the contemporary political order because there's too much crime, not enough freedom, not enough economic growth, etc.

Islam is clearly revolutionary, not reactionary. It was (for example) revolutionary when it swept northwards from the Arabian peninsula and took over Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and Persia, which were all homes to great pre-existing civilisations. Islam overthrew not only the historic rulers of those places, but also their historic religions, laws, manners, and mores, replacing them with its own.

Likewise, Islam has long sought to bring about the same kind of revolutionary change in Europe, having, however, been repelled rather consistently from the time of the battle of Tours until that of the peace of Passarowitz.

It then sunk into a state of sullen introspection for almost two hundred years - with the Ottoman empire, the principal Islamic power, being regarded as "the sick man of Europe" on the basis of its remaining small and backward possessions on that continent - and this lasted until the events of World War I (in which the Ottomans joined the Central Powers, prompting Britain and France to deploy troops to the Middle East) re-awakened Islamic aggressiveness.

Islam's renewed militancy has the same revolutionary fervour it did in Mahomet's day, and I believe it is this which its left-wing sympathisers in the West admire about it. Islam's treatment of women, its attitude towards homosexuality, and all the other particulars in which it differs from the current leftist politically-correct credo, are all small points of disagreement compared to the great points on which the Western left and Islam are agreed: they both detest Western civilisation, particularly insofar as it reflects Christianity, and the concentration of wealth held by persons of the white race living in the West, which they both believe should be re-distributed.

I don't see why it's "clearly revolutionary". As opposed to imperialistic.

I don't see why militaristic, imperial expansion is revolutionary.

You need to be clear about what "revolutionary" means. If you're going to use it to mean something like, "anything that happens, ever", then be consistent about it. You shouldn't call yourself a "reactionary". You should call yourself a revolutionary, since you want something to happen and you want things to be different from the way things are now.

Militant Islam is clearly revolutionary because it sweeps away, to the fullest extent it can, not only the religion(s), but also the laws, customs, and established institutions of the societies it conquers, and replaces them with its own.

In this respect it resembles the Jacobins, who abolished not only the French monarchy, but also the Catholic church, the pre-existing social hierarchy, and even the old system of weights and measures and the old calendar. It resembles the Bolsheviks, who did comparable things in Russia.

Traditional empires, such as the Roman and the British, did not seek to transform the societies of the places they conquered in this revolutionary fashion. They were interested in collecting tribute, not in the wholesale re-ordering of their subject peoples' lives. They simply put new rulers in charge, and allowed those aspects of the pre-existing civil societies within their new dominions to continue as before, insofar as they were compatible with their rule.

Indeed, both Rome and Britain found it convenient to make the previously independent rulers of their conquered territories into vassals (a, e.g., Herod was to the Romans, or the maharajahs of India were to the British), allowing most domestic administration to take place under their supervision.

A revolutionary movement does not, of course, exclude militaristic and imperial expansion. The Soviet Union was clearly revolutionary (as it never ceased to proclaim), and was also a militarized and imperialistic power. Lenin and Mahomet had much in common.

Islamism (as in the ideology of the "Islamists") seems quite distinct from Islam. The latter encompasses the former, but not vice versa. Islamism is a client ideology of the Western Cathedral, but its an entanglement that's done with at least several arms lengths between.

This can be seen in that a lot of Islamist governments and parties seem to include a lot of Western progressive buzzwords like "Democratic" and "Socialist". The most states most closely resembling actual traditional Islamic empires are the decidedly non-Islamist gulf states.

In this sense its somewhat like the relationship between the late Soviet Union and the Cathedral. Nobody in the right circles of New York wants to be seen actually saying Morsi's a good guy (like they used to actually say about Lenin circa 1925).

On the other hand frequently some Cathedral objective, like deposing the Shah of Iran or massacring some Hassidic West Bank settlers, can be accomplished with the help of the Islamists. In which case both sides are ultimately willing to pinch their noses and temporarily overlook how much they hate each other to get the job done.

The primary job of all religious institutions is to transfigure the ravings of the mad men that make up the corp of religious prophets into something amenable to a smoothly functioning civilization. If Christianity was put into practice as the un-distilled teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the West would still be getting razed by Central Asian horsemen.

The simplest approach is to highly discourage the unwashed masses from too closely reading the religion's primary sources. "Don't try this at home, you need a lot of training or else you'll get too confused." A self-selected hierarchal scholar class can sufficiently contort the original texts to any desired end. This is basically the approach taken by Talmudic rabbis, pre-Lutheran Catholicism and America's "living Constitution" legal system.

By the 19th century most Islamic sultanates had managed to layer on enough intellectual and political crud to pretty much cover up the major defects of the Quran. Much the same way that modern Christendom pretty much just ignores the crazier parts of Leviticus.

Islamism is an attempt to power wash away the cover-up crud holding together Middle Eastern civilization. Plus throw in a healthy dose of the worst of Western progressivism.

The Ottoman Empire circa 1875 was certainly no prize pig for the time. But if it was magically transported to 2013 and able to access modern-day technology it would easily be one of the most dynamic and efficient countries in the world.

Morsi's party is "Freedom and Justice". To me that seems to pass my litmus test of Cathedral entanglement: the name can plausibly substitute for a Jesse Jackson activist group. (Which isn't to say that it demonstrates current entanglement, only historical. Singapore's "People Action Party" runs the most reactionary government in the developed world, even though it sounds like a faction of Occupy Wall Street).

However looking over the list of Islamist parties around the world, a lot fewer than I remember seem to use progressive dog whistles. There's a continuum of Islamism running from completely Western influence free to heavily Cathedralized. Nobody's accusing the Taliban or Ansar Dine of cozying up with progressives.

But the "democratic Islamist" wing is thoroughly Cathedralized. Ennahda in Tunisia or AKP in Turkey are basically Christian Democrat parties for Muslims. And at the end of the day you can question their actual commitment to their progressive causes, but you can't deny that they're entangled in both form and function with the Cathedral.

To me the "democratic" and "fundamentalist" Islamists connection doesn't look that different than the Sinn Fein-IRA relationship. One side causes chaos, the other side plays the respectable straight man that offers to calm the hotheads down if you just give him a little bit of power.

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However looking over the list of Islamist parties around the world, a lot fewer than I remember seem to use progressive dog whistles. There's a continuum of Islamism running from completely Western influence free to heavily Cathedralized. Nobody's accusing the Taliban or Ansar Dine of cozying up with progressives.

But the "democratic Islamist" wing is thoroughly Cathedralized. Ennahda in Tunisia or AKP in Turkey are basically Christian Democrat parties for Muslims. And at the end of the day you can question their actual commitment to their progressive causes, but you can't deny that they're entangled in both form and function with the Cathedral.

"Freedom" and "justice" used in political party names aren't progressive dog whistles. Parties with "freedom" in their names tend to be right-wing. And "justice" used without the qualifier "social" tends to have right-wing, even fascist, connotations.

@DR, who wrote: "Much the same way that modern Christendom pretty much just ignores the crazier parts of Leviticus. "

Christians were excused from following them from the start, because Christianity rejected the Jewish Law in favor of the New Covenant, ratified by the redemptive sacrifice of Christ. Cf. Heb. viii:13, and ix, passim. Hence, Christians do not keep kosher, or observe "the crazier parts of Leviticus."

What does "center-right" even mean in 2013, other than full on hard-core leftist by the standard of any other civilization. Those parties were part of the total Cathedralization of Europe. CDs hold virtually no connection to the pre-war aristocratic, royalist or fascist ideologies that were the mainstay of the continent's right-wing. CDs are just another Cathedral outer party, no different than the GOP. Conservative progressives, in the same sense that Brezhnev was a conservative communist. None of them are going to truly challenge the ruling ideology.

Christian democracy was a way to deal with the more backwards Europeans who weren't going to embrace leftism hook, line and sinker like their more cosmopolitan counterparts. It was highly effective in that it completely neutered any of the true threats that the continental right-wing posed to the Cathedral in the early 20th century.

"Democratic Islamism" serves a pretty similar role. Superstitious, clannish, backwards Muslim peasants aren't to embrace universalist progressivism with gusto. This is a way to package the product to make it a little more palatable to them. Like candied medicine for kids.

Democratic Islamism strengthens, not weakens, the Cathedral's hold on the nations that embrace it. And if it means turning a blind eye to the ancillary pure Islamist factions that are benefitting from the democratic side's success, so be it. It's a small price to pay for progress and democracy.

I don't necessarily disagree with your characterization of the C-D parties, if we're going to speak of all politics in Western countries being dominated by liberals.

I disagree with your characterization of "Democratic Islamism". They are nothing like the C-D parties. Islamists reject democracy and liberalism. They want to implement Sharia Law. The alliance of convenience between Western liberals and Islamists is just that, an alliance of convenience. Western liberals have no problem working with Islamists as proxies against regimes they don't like, against Russia, Iran, China, etc. Islamists have no problem accepting help from Western liberals. The idea that Islamists are being tricked into accepting liberalism is absurd. Islamists think liberals are fools. They have no problem with accepting help from them and killing them at the same time.

This can be seen in that a lot of Islamist governments and parties seem to include a lot of Western progressive buzzwords like "Democratic" and "Socialist".

Muslim terrorist parties call themselves "socialist" or "democratic" to keep the foreign aid spigot flowing from USG and EU NGOs. Similar to Persia renaming itself to "Iran" to curry favor with the Nazi empire, except the Iranians didn't think they could play Adolf for a chump and get away with it like the Morsi Brotherhood can play USG.

Despite the best efforts of the American "government" it's certain Jean Monnet's Totale Bureaukracy, the Technocrats Paradise, the European Union, will crash and burn before we do thanks the now terminal economic state of Southern Europe.

If we are in late stage dictatorial bureaucracy, then Europe has tipped over into the end stage.

Rather amazing "rule by unelected technocrats" has proven to be more dangerous to Western civilization than Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia combined despite USG, Fabian Britain, and the EU having not, yet, fired a single bullet.

Following the catastrophe of the First World War, some thinkers and visionaries again began to float the idea of a politically unified Europe. In 1923, the Austrian Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-Europa movement and hosted the First Paneuropean Congress, held in Vienna in 1926. The aim was for a specifically Christian, and by implication Roman Catholic, Europe. In contrast Trotsky raised the slogan "For a Soviet United States of Europe" in 1923, for a non-Christian but communist Europe.

In 1929, Aristide Briand, French prime minister, gave a speech in the presence of the League of Nations Assembly in which he proposed the idea of a federation of European nations based on solidarity and in the pursuit of economic prosperity and political and social co-operation. Many eminent economists, among them John Maynard Keynes, supported this view. At the League's request Briand presented a Memorandum on the organisation of a system of European Federal Union in 1930.

In 1931 the French politician Édouard Herriot published the book The United States of Europe. The British civil servant Arthur Salter published a book of the same name in 1933.

Between the two world wars the Polish statesman Józef Piłsudski envisaged the idea of a "United States of Central Europe" (called Międzymorze translated as Intermarum, "Intersea" or "Between-seas"), a Polish-oriented version of Mitteleuropa.

The Great Depression, the rise of fascism and communism and subsequently World War II prevented the inter war movements from gaining further support.Impact of the Second World War

In Britain the group known as Federal Union was launched in November 1938, and began advocating a Federal Union of Europe as a post-war aim. Its papers and arguments became well known among resistants to fascism across Europe and contributed to their thinking of how to rebuild Europe after the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Union

Federal Union is a Pro-European British group launched in November 1938, to advocate a Federal Union of Europe as a post-war aim. The founders of the organisation were Charles Kimber (1912-2008),[1] Derek Rawnsley and Patrick Ransome. [2] Other noted members of Federal Union included Harold Wilson, Barbara Wootton, C. E. M. Joad, Stephen King-Hall and Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian.[2] In 1940 the group set up a Federal Union Research Institute (FURI), chaired by William Beveridge, to discuss the direction of post-war European integration. FURI attracted contributors from across the political spectrum, including F.A. Hayek, J. B. Priestley, H. N. Brailsford, Lionel Robbins and Arnold Toynbee. [3]

In 1956 it argued for British participation in the European Economic Community. [2] It continues to exist today, arguing for federalism for the whole of Europe and the world.

Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet (French: [ʒɑ̃ mɔnɛ]; 9 November 1888 – 16 March 1979) was a French political economist and diplomat. He is regarded by many as a chief architect of European unity[1] and one of the founding fathers of the European Union.

snip

Inter-war years

At the Paris Peace Conference, Monnet was an assistant to the French minister of commerce and industry, Etienne Clémentel, who proposed a "new economic order" based on European cooperation. The scheme was officially rejected by the Allies in April 1919.[3]

Due to his contributions to the war effort, Monnet, at the age of thirty-one, was named Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations by French premier Georges Clemenceau and British statesman Arthur Balfour, upon the League's creation in 1919.

snip

In 1945 Monnet proposed the Monnet Plan, als known as the "Theory of l'Engrenage" (not to be confused with the Schuman plan). It included taking control of the remaining German coal-producing areas and reditecting the production away from the German industry and into the French, thus permanently weakening Germany and raising the French economy considerably above its pre-war levels. The plan was adopted by Charles de Gaulle in early 1946.[1]

Later that year, Monnet successfully negotiated the Blum–Byrnes agreement with the United States, which cleared France from a $2.8 billon debt (mostly World War I loans) and provided the country with an additional low-interest loan of $650 million. In return, France opened its cinemas to American movies.[6]

In 1947 France removed the Saar from Germany, with U.S. support, and turned it into the Saar protectorate, which was politically independent and under complete French economic control.

Booker and North have done yeoman work in exploring scores of original sources related to the modern European Union. Most impressively, they have returned to the 1920s, when the contemporary notion of "European Union" began. They note that an element of deception has been present since the very earliest years of the project, demonstrating that the idea's early exponents believed that their utopian ideals, whilst admirable, ought to be realized without the knowledge or participation of the member countries' peoples. In fact, Booker and North reveal that a strong tendency of the strain of Unionists which created the present Brussels regime has been to shun democracy by creating a supranational authority with no meaningful accountability to the people, whilst simultaneously subverting individual states' national sovereignty.